Silver Czech team and a potato medal in individuals at the World Championship in Italy 2018
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Written by Karel Křivanec
Photographs taken by Igor Slavík
This year‘s World Fly Fishing Championship was held in the Italian town of Comano Terme in the valley of the Sarca River, between 17th and 23rd September. Twenty-nine teams and 148 individuals took part in this event. This article was written based on the views of Czech competitors who I interviewed during the October elimination competition in South Bohemia. I wanted to heal the silence which started after last year’s season when the team captain and a team manager finished and I wanted to preserve a traditional Czech view of the highest world event for fly fishermen. From this point of view, I would like to remind that the Czechs were second in Slovakia 2017 and Antonin Pesek (CZE) won his second world individual trophy.
And now to the Italian championship where the Czechs had a team consisting of Antonin Pesek (Fishing Captain), Frantisek Kouba, David Chlumsky, Vojtech Unger, Lukas Starýchfojtu and Igor Slavík as a Team Manager. The team had a week-long preparation before the Championship at the venue where David Chlumsky managed to catch a beautiful brown trout on the Sarca River (705 mm).
Bronze of Czech youth from the San River – but this time about extremely fine huge grayling fishing
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By Karel Křivanec
Between 6 and 12 August 2018, the 17th Youth World Fly Fishing Championship was held on the San River. This time 10 teams were present, 8 from Europe and one from the USA and one from South Africa, i.e. altogether two teams less than in Slovenia a year ago. Unfortunately, also British teams were missing this time and therefore the only representative from the islands was the Irish team which takes part regularly in these championships.
After the last year’s failure in Slovenia (5th place), the Czech team changed the coach and now the coach was Martin Musil Jr., a student of ichthyology, who became the Youth World Champion in France in 2012. Jiří Pejchar, President of the Czech National Fly Fishing Committee, was the Team Manager was and a member of more numerous accompaniment was Tomáš Starýchfojtů, former successful Czech competitor and a coach of the senior team.
Double gold European Championship
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By Pavel Chyba
My fourth participation in the European Championship was this year on the Vltava River in our country and the Květoňov Reservoir. I did not like premature opinions that we are fishing at home and the result is clear and you will only see who will be the first, who the second, etc. As I also remember the World Championship 2014 in our country, when we really worked hard and we had a great piece of luck and nothing was clear until the very last round. Nevertheless, extremely strong Czech team consisted of four individual and four multiple European Champions in teams and this filled me up with optimism that this time I could touch the European gold medal in teams. This was the last medal which I was missing in my collection.
Two weeks before the Championship my new fan Matthew was born and I could not take part in the first trainings. I chose classic practice before the Championship. I arrived as the last one of our team, but some guys went home to see families and we somehow changed during the trainings. I will not describe in detail what all we were testing. Simply said, we tried all fly fishing styles and with all styles we caught something. Who knows the Vltava River, must know that the river is full of fish and you can fish with anything. However, it is important to choose the important things. And now to the competition itself …