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IMPORTANT
SITE UPDATE:
Visit the relaunched
Fish & Fly at fishandfly.com
AUSTRIA
Our September 1999 contribution from Jon Beer
Once upon a time I was reading a brochure about fishing in the western Pyrenees. The brochure said the trout fishing was at its best in July and August. Now July and August are usually crumby fishing so I was delighted to find somewhere that was at its best in these difficult months. And so I went to the western Pyrenees in August and it was crumby. They said I should have come in May and June - like everywhere else.
I mention his now because we have just lived though another crumby July and August on the rivers and you may have found somewhere at its brilliant best and if you have I really think you ought to share this priceless information with one and all. Particularly me.
In fact, I'll swap you. I do know of one place where the fishing is at its best in those dire dog days. And its best is very, very good indeed. It is Osttirol.
It sounds like
an ointment for acne: in fact, it is a delightful little world, hidden
away on the southern slopes of the Austrian Alps. The first taste I had
of its fishing was on an August morning. I was fishing with Günther,
the owner of the Hotel Sonne in Lienz, the charming little capital of
Osttirol. We had driven off the road and pulled up in some scrub beside
the river when his mobile phone went off. While Günther was busy
hotelling I wandered down through the trees to the river's edge. There
is a bluey clarity to limestone waters. The Little Drau river was rattling
past at a fair old lick. At first glance it appeared an unbroken white-water
rapid but there were glassy glides and calmer eddies towards the bank
and behind stones. Where I was standing the main channel swept between
a couple of boulders to form a deeper pool with a bottom of pale gravel.
The broken, bouncing surface gave a tantalising illusion of grey shapes
swooping in the depths of the pool. As I stood there one of these grey
fragments swooped up towards the surface and became a fish. I was standing
just a yard or two from a thoroughly rising trout.
I tried to look like just another bush reversing slowly from the water's edge. Günther was still on the phone. I picked up my rod and tied on what I always tie on to start with - an Easy Rider Dun. With its hare's ear body and mixed grizzle-and-red hackle it could be almost anything. I just hoped it could be something Tyrolean.
I stood behind the last bush and made my first cast in Austria. A grey shape detached itself from the bottom and rose through the water, tilting up to the fly. Just occasionally fly-fishing is that easy.
It was a rainbow trout of just one pound. Not a stewpond stockie: the rainbows breed here and in the fast, cold water of the southern Alps they grow silver bright and dashing. We caught more of the same as we worked our way up the Little Drau, fishing speculative dry flies between the boulders and runs of that delightful river.
Lienz stands at the confluence of the Little Drau and the Isel. The day before we had followed the Isel down from the high mountain passes that separate the little world of Osttirol from the rest of Austia. The Isel was not an attractive sight, a milky brown of meltwater from the Alpine glaciers. But the Little Drau and other tributaries of the Isel come from the side valleys where there are no glaciers. There is snow, of course, and meltwater can be a nuisance earlier in the warm afternoons of spring and early summer but in July and August the snow has gone from the lower slopes and the fishing really is at its sparkling best. Most of the fishing in these rivers is privately owned but much of it is owned by the hotels and guesthouses along the banks and reserved for guests. Several of these hotels, big and small, have arrangements, one with another, of fishing swaps so that a visitor can fish several different waters without having to change hotels. Which was how I came to fish the Dorfer.
The Dorferbach
is a small mountain stream that tumbles from the slopes of Großglockner.
"Groß", according to my Collins Gem German dictionary means "big".
I would go along with that. I couldn't find "glockner" in the dictionary,
but whatever a glockner is, this one - three times the height of Ben Nevis
- is a big one. It is Austria's highest peak - and that is up against
some pretty stiff competition.
The Taurerwirt Hotel nestles high in the mountains but there is an awful lot of mountain above it. Peter Rogl owns the hotel and fishes these high streams. We climbed up into the valley of the Dorfer. Like many alpine streams it appears unfishable above the valley floor, a series of high falls dropping down a narrow cleft of a gorge. But above the gorge the sides widen again to form a broad alpine valley. Up here we caught trout more than a mile above sea level. And not just trout. Up here amongst the glaciers the Dorfer is a minor miracle. It remains clear throughout the summer, fed from springs in the limestone that filter the glacial silt from the summer meltwater. The water is crystal and achingly cold. And while the rest of the world was drooping in the tired old days of August we were catching wild little brook char in a magical mountain stream.
Tirol Tourist Board: http://www.livingroom.tirol.at/
Austrian National Tourist Office: http://www.anto.com/
Infoseek
Travel Guide To Austria
If you have your own information to add please drop us a line.
Jon Beer contributes regularly to publications including Trout & Salmon and The Telegraph. If you have any comments, do not hesitate to get in touch or use the message board.