“Bream on fly are hard enough at the best of times, I reckon. Catching them while quietly wading and casting to visible, nervous bow waves and swirls hard up on a snaggy edge in super skinny water simply makes a hard thing that much harder!
Hats off to Jo for fooling this one and dropping another while I had to settle for the flathead consolation prize! She’s getting to be a bit too bloody good since immersing herself in the trout fly tournament scene. I think I need to start giving her a handicap when we fish together!”
Reading the above post on my husband Steve’s page on Facebook made me feel chuffed and coy, all at once. For an internationally recognised angler to elevate my skills like this is pretty damn good for the ego! It also got me thinking about the influence comp fishing has had on my skillset. After last year’s Australian Fly Fishing Championships, I enthused that I learned more in that three days of competition than I did in my entire “Fly Gear Gap Year” undertaken in 2018!
So what is it about the tournament setting that intensifies the learning experience?
Tournaments impose conditions that force you to develop your skills. In the loch-style tournaments on the fly fishing circuit, for example, anglers must fish in a seated position. This amplifies the need for disciplined casting and tight fighting techniques.
Fishing comps are not for everyone. Some of us will never take part in one, others will go hard for a time and then retire from the scene, while others are a slow burn. I’m the latter.
Fishing wafted in and out of my life when I was young, but was never more than a passing activity, jumped at with as much gusto as an invitation to “the pictures” or a picnic in the botanic gardens. It was a fine way to whittle away some time, but I could take it or leave it.
When my sister-in-law invited me to join her fishing team, I jumped at that too… with a giggle. I was hardly proficient! Little did I know that the simple shift in impetus from social outing to competition would change my life completely. For the record, that is NOT an exaggeration!
A successful double-hookup for Team Sister Act during SWB in 2008, three years after my first competition. Tanya Urvet is my teammate here.
Still a clown! My jubilation at catching a fish hasn’t changed since I first started fishing comps… as you’ll discover below.
What was it about tournaments that tipped the scales for me? Benchmarking.
I think many people assume that the competition is external to the competitor; that the motivation in tournaments is to best the opponents. I’m not going to make a sweeping statement to the contrary, but I can assert that’s not my personal motivation (and I’m sure I’m not unique).
For me, the attraction to competition fishing is about beating myself… the quest for continuous improvement. If you don’t relate, think about your elation when you achieve a new PB. It’s a similar thing.
My current challenge is to come to terms with the Euro-nymphing technique. As you can see… I don’t mmind the training sessions 😉
The structure in a tournament compartmentalises fishing skills, forcing me to analyse individual aspects and tweak each one, chasing success down the chain. It hones my focus, much like a tai chi movement may be a punch slowed right down to allow infinitesimal scrutiny of the entire delivery, enabling a far more efficient and devastating delivery of a real-time power blow.
This piece-meal focus is my strategy for overcoming the challenges and pressures of competing in a field of more competent anglers. If I were to try competing with some of the incredible talent I fish amongst, I’d lose myself in anxiety and comparison sickness. By competing with myself, tearing apart each outing and choosing an area to improve upon in the next, I quieten my mind and stay in my own moment.
Yep… I’m still just as excited with today’s successes as I was twenty years ago when I fished my first tournament.
Do I need to compete to achieve this?
Each will have their own view on this, but I believe I do. I’m far less focussed on the detail during my social fishing adventures. They’re more about the outing and the company than the skill set. When fishing is about enjoyment first, we tend to pack our tackle when the conditions aren’t favourable, so we are never truly pushing beyond our comfort zones.
Competition fishing forces us to hone our skills and adapt to varying conditions. In the fly tournaments I’ve been enjoying over the past two years, river beats are assigned by random draw. We get ten minutes to walk the beat and decide on a plan before we start our session. Good beats versus bad, fishy versus barren… make of it what you can.
I imagine this is akin to the challenges faced by guides who don’t have the luxury of a six-month weather forecast. I can’t remember which one of my guide friends it was who once told me that the best fishing was most often in appalling weather… a fact they knew from not having the opportunity to bunk it if the conditions were crappy.
I distinctly recall NOT wanting to get up pre-dawn and fish on this day during the 2016 Golden Classic. It was FREEZING! But fish we did, and caught plenty.
A bad beat challenges you to find fish in water you’d normally walk past. And when you find one, the surprise blows your eyebrows back… that’s for sure! But you also find yourself taking a second look at that piece and water and wondering just how many fish you overlook on halcyon days.
Solo competitions like the fly fishing tournaments are a fantastic arena for testing techniques, honing them, and witnessing your own growth as an angler. After all, there’s no one else to claim part of success or failure. It’s all on you. The resulting confidence cannot be understated. Failure affords the opportunity for reflection, adjustment, and improvement… and provides the measure for success.
That doesn’t diminish the power of team tournaments in any way. In fact, I’m in the process of packing for the Barra Nationals on the Daly River (NT) as I write this. I still feel the flutterings of nervous butterflies each time I turn my mind north to that event. For the first time in a very long time, I will not be skipper. I’ll be fishing alongside two other women from the national leadership team of the Women’s Recreational Fishing League without the responsibility of “being in control”.
Team Barra’Prentice in the 2018 Barra Nationals comprised Rebecca Roberts (L), me, and Vicki Lear (R). The tutus signify that we hadn’t ever caught a barra in a Barra Nat’s before. They were all retired before the end of the comp 😉
Read “social conditioning”. Like any team sport, fishing comps encourage growth in our social, diplomatic, and teamwork skills. There’s strategy to discuss and settle, techniques to coordinate (the various styles of fishing don’t all play nicely together), and personalities to manage — especially under pressure. That pressure can be through any number of external factors imposed by the competition: comfort levels; stress; fatigue; mind games… and the mental toughness of each competitor is vital to team success.
Returning to the question I posed earlier about whether I need to compete to achieve the improvements I seek in my fishing skills, I think it’s clear that the learning impetus inherent through the challenge of competition is vastly more intense than I could ever recreate in a social setting. It simply comes down to mindset… a truth in any sport.
My ethos is this: whether in social or tournament settings, other anglers are a benchmark by which to measure my progress. The person I compete with is the me that last cast my rod.
I did enjoy stalking that bream on the flats… it was tough. There was very little going on. It was one of those days that you’d be tempted to just pack in and go for a beer… but I know better than that. With every retrieve, my eyes and ears were scanning for any abnormal ripple, and when that fellow revealed his position, my stealthy trout stalker mode clicked in. I stayed low, I moved slow, and I worked up to him… the take was subtle, but not subtle enough. My triumph rippled over the waters like the twilight rays — joyous and clear. That’s one distinct pleasure lost in the fly fishing comps… we don’t tend to yahoo!
Jo Starling
Author
Jo is the Founder and National President of the Women’s Recreational Fishing League. Her greatest passion is sharing the empowerment that invariably grows through the sport with any women who care to listen.
Although battling for over thirty years, Jo has only recently been diagnosed with PTSD. This diagnosis was an epiphany, explaining why she’d felt estranged from herself for so long.
Jo came late to fishing, but since being introduced to the sport by her loving sisters-in-law, life took a positive turn. With the clarity of her diagnosis, Jo is able to understand why fishing became such an imperative. Today, she is committed to ensuring everyone learns of its magic.