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IMPORTANT
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Visit the relaunched
Fish & Fly at fishandfly.com
Ski-ing for Trout - Part One
Our January 2003 contribution from Theo Pike
In his first article for Fish & Fly, Theo Pike reports on his recent fly fishing trip to the French Alps.
Day 1
Anticipation’s running high as we board our Easyjet flight to Geneva. Sally, my girlfriend, is thrilled at the thought of standing at the top of her favourite ski slopes in the Portes du Soleil and going “Ooh, aah” at the red runs she was carving down so confidently in January. Would-be ski-bum though I am too, I’m much more exercised by the thought of the 480km of mountain torrents that my 19 Euro “carte touristique” fishing permit will get me in the Chablais-Genevois region of France. According to the guidebook, it’s an alpine wilderness where the annual light stocking of genetically local wild “farios” should be well augmented by the “truites lacustres” – silver sewin-like fish that run up the rivers out of Lake Geneva with the first storms of summer.
An alpine wilderness, what’s more, where I’ll be casting a line for the first time outside the British Isles…
This being the first anniversary of 9/11, Gatwick is packed, and so is our flight. But there’s tangible relief as the cabin crew make no mention of the minute’s silence at 1.46pm, during which we’re somewhere on the final approach into Geneva Cointrin. Tall buildings passing suddenly at porthole level don’t seem nearly so thrilling today…
There’s the usual kerfuffle over getting my rod case back from the baggage handlers – never again, I swear, will I travel without a six-piece Smuggler in my carry-on. And then onto the road we remember so well from a skidding snow-bound minibus, up, up and away into the Alps, Geneva fading under a thundercloud behind us, Chatel and the gorge of the Dranse ahead.
Dusk isn’t far off as we reach our B&B – a tiny hotel-cum-mountain restaurant in the off-season of the off-season. But I creep down to the Dranse as it babbles behind Le Renard, and the air is suddenly full of sedges. The grass is swarming with them too, but there’s no sign of fish in the babbling, rocky water of the river. Time enough to find them tomorrow.
Day 2
Wanting to hit the water as hard as I can, whilst muscling in as lightly as possible on the locals, I’ve made strenuous efforts to book one of them as a guide for my first morning on the Dranse d’Abondance. Sylvain Dubacq is the owner of the local “coutellerie”, and it’s an 8.00am start outside his shop. But our cheery grins of good morning elicit merely a Gallic shrug and a “Desole, je peux pas vous accompagner ce matin”. No further explanation, no offer of any other morning either.
What’s hatching, then? And, out of 35km of water on this fork of the Dranse alone, can he recommend anywhere to go? Sally’s fluency eventually rides to the rescue of my stuttering A-level-a-decade-back French: we establish that, sure enough, “c’est le temps du sedge” and that we should try heading downriver a few miles and fishing back up. Bearing a single, tiny 2 Euro caddis, the last from an sparsely untidy tray, we head out into the chilly morning where the sun’s just burning the dew off the conifers. Later we uncharitably conclude that, in common with most of the other locals, Sylvain’s mainly a bait fisherman, and regards my obsession with trying to fly-fish the Dranse as eccentrically English at best, inexplicably lunatic at worst.
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But dutifully down the curving Val d’Abondance we go, and find the water he’s recommended starting inauspiciously behind a cloud of dust and a very functioning sawmill. Of one accord we swing the car around, and find the river again half a mile up, already discovering it’s one thing for this tumbling, still-eroding torrent to be there, quite another to get at it down vertiginous banks and almost-virgin scrub. There’s a haze of sedges where the sun hits the water, but in the currents between the rocks there’s nary a sign of a fish. Nothing daunted, Sylvain’s sedge goes on the fine tippet, and I’m into the river, fishing fast upstream as I’d pick the pockets of a Scottish burn.
And… nothing. As the day wears on into evening, I reconnoitre and fish through four separate, swirling stretches of the Dranse above and below Abondance. Shallow wading under arching beech and willows; treacherous, torrentially rounded rocks that I swear every second will give me the ducking I’ve already bargained for. Dries, wets, and heavy Czech nymphs swarm from fly box to fleece patch. And never a rise, never even a fin of a fish, to tell me there’s anything in this river. We retire, exhausted, to Le Renard and the gourmet “salade savoyade” that Sally’s been looking forward to for the last six months.
Day 3
We’re here to see the country as well as raid its rivers, so today we decide to head over the hills to a different fork of the many–pronged Dranse. The road hairpins up to Bonnevaux, over the Col de Corbier, and steeply down to the Dranse de Morzine. The water’s different here: faster and deeper than in the gentler Val d’Abondance, and I’m correspondingly more hopeful. Under a vast wall of rock that falls sheer into the river, in every crevice of which there’s a full-grown tree, I load up for bear. Autumn’s coming – fish will be getting hormonal – a 10lb leader and a weighted orange gold-head streamer fished downstream should look enough like provocation.
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Should? Back on the bank with the thermos, there’s consolation in finding that a new, and very French, kind of Jaffa cake has made its way into the commissariat. Instead of the “tangy, orangey bit” in the adverts, there’s a yummy glob of plastic raspberry. There’s even a cherry version, particularly tasty with coffee-mated builder’s tea by the side of a troutless torrent…
Noonday sun, and upstream towards the ski-ing centre of Morzine. Gesticulating wildly, I force Sally and the Opel off the road and across a quarry-like surface to a view of the river on the far horizon. Russia? The Rockies? It’s perfect. Rounded boulders collect into an island bounded by two flat channels, the further running deeper and shaded under a forest of birch and alder. And, in the foreground, a pair of Frenchmen in a 2CV raising a tribal riff on bongos. It’s an strangely appropriate soundtrack to the afternoon, as I fish repeatedly down those channels with streamers and wet flies, and fail again to raise any interest from the elusive fish. At last we sit and watch the water flowing under the sunset and the mountains, letting the surrealism sink into our souls.
Day 4
Saturday means no summer roadworks in the French Alps. No roadworks mean the road through Bioge will be open. And apart from shadows in a pool at the bottom of the Gorges du Pont du Diable, which might as well take the Dranse de Morzine to the centre of the earth for all we can fish it, we’ve still seen nothing remotely catchable in the whole river system. Perhaps it’s time to cast further afield.
A little east of Geneva, an hour’s drive to the southwest of our base in Chatel, winds the valley of the Menoge. It’s a different watershed, this “Vallee Verte”, and very different country: lower, softer, more pastoral. Whisper it softly, but the river looks almost like an English chalkstream. There’s none of the ice-blue milkiness that tinges the upper courses of the Dranse: golden gravels glow under smooth-flowing glass and fade into the shadows of mysterious pools. Best of all, I’ve discovered on the internet that this is artificial fly and nymph, catch and release water only. Surely a chance of a trout?
We stalk through shaded shallows, upstream of a ruined bridge. From somewhere we can’t determine, there’s the unmistakeable, heart-stopping, and oh-so-welcome splosh of a fish. It’s not repeated.
The afternoon wears on, the gravels glow golden and empty under the sun, and round the corner comes the first fisherman we’ve seen on this side of the Channel. Not just a fisherman, but a fly-fisherman too. “Bonjour, bonjour”. He’s got all the gear: Simms waders, Oakley shades, Orvis lanyard dangling nineteen different strengths of tippet round his neck. As we fall into conversational Franglais, it emerges he’s a long-time member of the fly-only club that fishes these public waters. He’s on his first visit this season, and has seen only a couple of fingerlings all day. Dark rumours abound of broken rules – of fish caught with worms, quietly knifed (he accompanies this with a sinister, inimitably two-fingered stabbing motion), taken home for “bouillon”. He professes himself “tres decu”.
By the time he leaves us, cow bells have joined the angelus from the village round the hill. And suddenly, miraculously, there’s a rise. I’m taking no chances. A long, smooth run, deeply shaded under trees: this is terrestrial territory.
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The fish keeps rising as I tie the leader with trembling fingers. I roll the foam-bodied Fluoro Beetle out across the slightly-tilting surface. A flick of light where it lands, and a surge as the fish takes. And spits. I reel in.
At least there’s something in this water.
Downstream, towards Fillinges and Geneva, looms a double-banked jungle of Japanese knotweed – the same stuff, apparently, that’s strangling country churchyards everywhere in Cornwall and the west of Wales. We bushwhack through the woody stems, and slip out onto a gravel shoal. Half a dozen huge red spinners dance overhead, and two fish rise in alternate tiny swirls against a bank that’s undercut almost to the colour of the mayflies. I show them every reasonable fly in my box, then some a lot less reasonable, then a few even I don’t think they’ll tolerate. At last I hang up my favourite Daddy-long-legs in a tree behind, swear profusely as I break it off, and give up trying to match this hatch. The tiddlers sip serenely.
3 – 0 to the fish. I’ve come all this way to France, and I’ve never felt so baffled. Nor more comprehensively skunked.
> On to Part Two of this article
Theo Pike is a writer first and a small-stream fly-fisher second – though it’s sometimes less clear cut than that would suggest.
Currently he’s working for an advertising agency in West London, but he can also be contacted for writing and editing commissions through his freelance website, www.blackrussian.cc