My First Fly Fishing Competition: Rules, Beats and Three Sessions

I came away from my first fly fishing competition with far more than a placing. This is the whole thing written down — the rules, what each beat turned out to be, and the mistakes and wins from every session — partly as a record for myself, partly as a reference for anyone about to fish their first event.

Comp fished 4–5 October 2026 · translated from the Chinese original.

The rules

1. Scoring threshold: a fish only counts if it is 15cm or longer.
2. Scoring species: only lenok (细鳞鲑) and grayling (茴鱼) count.
3. Score formula: 10 + fish length × 2.
4. Beat allocation: each angler gets 300m of river, with a 10m buffer between beats. Beat boundaries are marked by numbered triangular flags.

A few worked examples:

The sessions

The beats, in hindsight

Beat numbers increase going upstream. After three sessions the character of each stretch was obvious:

1. Beats 1–4 (downstream): shallow water, plenty of slow glides and a few deeper pockets, but very few fish. The big ones are there, just scarce — you have to place the fly precisely next to a fish, and with limited competition time, spending most of it chasing a few big fish does not pay. If a placing is out of reach, these are the beats to gamble on for a single largest fish. Over three sessions, several anglers who could clearly fish well came unstuck on this stretch.
2. Beats 5–8: unremarkable, but a good angler can still score well.
3. Beat 9: the gold beat. Three sessions, three anglers, each of them landing more than 20 fish, all of them 20–40cm.
4. Beats 10–13: second only to beat 9.

What I got wrong

1. In session 1 (beat 8, a decent beat) I started on a dry fly when there was no surface activity and the surroundings were wrong for casting one. After about ten minutes I switched to euro nymphing and immediately hooked a lenok.
2. In session 1, nymphing shallow water (10–20cm deep), I was poor at reading takes and lost several of the better fish near the fast water under the bankside trees.
3. When nymphing on my knees, there is very little line outside the rod tip. After hooking a fish it is better to shuffle backwards slowly and let the line out in stages, then stand up to net it. I netted one from my knees and lost a genuinely big fish.
4. I had brought a euro rig and a dry-fly rod but nothing to rest a rod on, so the dry-fly rod lived in my pocket — the tip went down on the ground several times, and once the tippet snagged in the zip. Wasted time.
5. In sessions 1 and 2 I covered my beat once in about three hours, which is slow. More passes would have produced more fish — in session 3 I went back through the productive spots several times.
6. I skipped a lot of likely water: in sessions 1 and 2 I barely searched the shallow back-eddies near the bank, because I assumed that still, clear water with no visible fish held nothing. In session 3 I nymphing two lenok out of exactly that kind of spot.
7. Several times I snagged a fly in a tree and simply walked over to free it — on good spots, too, which probably spooked a lot of fish. I should have broken off and re-tied, and only worked the fly free when it would not disturb anything.

What I got right

1. Session 1 put me on beat 8. A thick fallen tree on that beat held a visible pod of fish — five or six, big and small — in barely 30cm of water, but the timber made it a magnet. I fished it as if it were spinibarbus (军鱼): disturb the pod as little as possible, take them one at a time. I approached the tree on my knees, used a bow-and-arrow style cast from the rod tip to drop the fly ahead of the pod, then stripped the slack with my line hand — the fly barely reached the fish before it was taken. I landed four or five lenok there (I lost count; the video will tell). Everything in session 1 came to the nymph — nine fish. I also watched a fish take a natural dry fly in an awkward slot, tried it a few times, and on the second or third cast it ate — then came off halfway in.
2. Session 2 put me on beat 3. Nearly 100m of it runs past the draw area, with people coming and going, and it holds no larger fish — mostly shallow glides you can read end to end. But it has one deep pool (1.5–2m). I had looked at that pool before session 1 and never saw a fish in it, so I ignored it all of session 2. Downstream of the pool, though, there was a lot of small surface activity — grayling taking tiny midges, I assumed. I judged those fish too small to score and paid them no attention; I only noted where the rises were, which turned out to be the key. I had written beat 3 off, but I went back to those rise positions with a dry fly — and everything I caught made the 15cm threshold. So I worked every spot I believed held grayling with the dry, taking seven or eight on it, then two more grayling on the nymph in the glides beside the likely fast water, plus two lenok from two spots I was certain held fish. Twelve fish for the session.
3. Session 3 drew beat 3 again. My first instinct was to give up: after session 2, the anglers sitting in the top three had all drawn good beats. But I kept watching — this time we had nearly 20 minutes before the 9:00 start — and walking the beat I found rises in several of the slow, still spots, much like the previous afternoon. It looked like a lot of scoring-size grayling. So at the start I went straight at those spots with the dry fly and took four or five in the first hour — it should have been more than ten. A basic error cost me: I kept fishing the same oversized hook until I had dropped five fish, always thinking the next cast would hold. Once the dry-fly water was done I decided to try the deep pool I had never touched. I had only ever looked at it from the right bank (looking upstream) and never seen a fish. This time I walked around through the shallow water upstream to the left bank — and there was a big dark shape. I tied on a 4.0mm caddis nymph (orange tungsten bead, imitating a cased caddis), coloured the sighter darker, and worked the fly towards the shape. On the closest pass the fly drifted vaguely in front of it, I saw the fish turn its head — I was not watching the line and felt nothing — struck experimentally, and hooked it. After a short fight it ran downstream and went into the net: 42cm, a personal best. With the dry fly doing the work, session 3 produced 18 fish (on the nymph alone I doubt I would have managed five). The same grayling I had caught in session 2, tail bitten and 1–2cm short, came to the net again in session 3.
4. Once a fish is in the net, move fast where you can — the seconds add up.
5. A hardened oil-based marker as a sighter paid for itself: both times I drew beat 3, the nymphable water was very shallow, so instead of re-rigging the leader I just coloured the sighter down to the depth I wanted to fish. I even nymphing two fish under 15cm (one lenok, one grayling) out of water barely ten centimetres deep.

What I took away

• A productive spot is not fished out. Come back to it after a while and it will usually produce again.
• Nymphing under fallen trees: change to a slightly lighter fly, let the current carry it in under the timber, and reach in short-line with the rod tip — the shadow of the rod itself can spook fish.
• When there is no room to cast behind you: go slightly heavier and use a bow-and-arrow cast.
• When you spot a fish in an awkward spot: approach it on your knees. It works.
• Surface activity plus gentle current, and nymphing hard: that is the moment to fish a dry fly.
• Heavily fished beats: after the competition, other anglers kept catching good lenok on dries. It left me wondering whether a dry fly is simply better on water that has been worked over repeatedly — a question to answer next time.