Stan Freyheit tells us about a river he knows that means a lot to him and looks like it has some amazing grayling fishing. Paradise? It might just be!
I want to present you here the river that gave birth to my burning passion for fly fishing. This river is called the Mosel River.
Three countries and many fish.
The Mosel springs in the heart of the Vosges Mountains in the north east of France. Until the end of the Vosges mountain range, the Mosel is only inhabited by trout. Out of these green granitic mountains, the Mosel weaves in a wide valley, where water is warming up slightly, giving a perfect habitat for grayling. Grayling are the essence of the Mosel. We will find them on a long stretch of a hundred kilometers of blue steel streams, running on round and smooth gravel, where our ladies of the streams are searching for caddis and mayflies.
When reaching the city of Nancy, the Mosel slows down and is warmed up by dams, and we enter the land of asps, pikes and cyprinids. After France, the Mosel enters Luxembourg for a short trip, and then reaches Germany, and the mighty Rhin river in Koblenz.
A perfect school for grayling fly fishing.
The main part of the Mosel flowing in France is a perfect grayling zone. The grayling zone is defined by three main characteristics of the habitat, suitable for grayling: temperature, gravel size, and oxygen.
We find all these features in the Mosel: freshwater coming from the mountains, running down on perfect size gravel - good for spawning beds and aquatic invertebrate life – and many rocks along all the dark blue streams of the Mosel.
The Mosel snakes in a wide valley, offering long streams rippled by big round gravel, showing many small waves on the surface.
And this kind of stream is perfect to learn nymphing: this regular flow of water allows you to perform neat drifts of your nymphs, and to make you comfortable about the good load of tungsten you need on your nymph to reach the grayling.
New explorations every year.
That’s what I love in big rivers. Every year, floods are moving the gravel, and changing the places where grayling stand. Every spring, I discover a new river. Some streams are not irrigated enough to host grayling, and some old parts of the river are connected back to the main stream, and provide new shelter for the grayling.
Autumn on the Mosel, the time of the risings.
The lower part of the Mosel river is a totalally wild place – classified as a regional natural reserve – where the water is a bit hot in summer, pushing the grayling back in the depths of the streams, not reachable on the fly.
When autumnal cold is here, massive insect hatches are coming, and grayling are gathering on the big flat pools of the river, rising on the rhythm of a pendulum of dark olive flies.
This is the time when we love to gather with friends on the pools, sharing a good time, trying to convince the ladies of the stream that our imitations are tastier than natural insects...
A scalimetric study to preserve grayling.
When I was a student in ecology (I am now a professional fly tier), I decided to run a scalimetric study on the grayling of the Mosel river to understand what was the age of grayling when they first reach maturity. The goal of this study was obviously to check that the capture size was really adapted to this strain of grayling.
We looked for different methods to catch samples of grayling on a hundred kilometer stretch of river. Electro fishing was not working on this kind of large river, so I gathered a team of fly fisherman, to catch my grayling samples on barbless nymphs! All the fish were returned after taking a bunch of scales for the study.
You can see on the picture below the different winter marks on the grayling scale, determining his age.
The result of the study was that this strain of grayling from the north east of France was reaching 35 cm in three years, the age of their fist sexual maturity year.
The capture size was then 30 cm, a big error in river management. This study was really useful to prove that the size of capture was really too low, and the Mosel trust changed the capture size from 30 to 35 cm, a good move for the Mosel graylings!
If you enjoy nymph fishing, you can visit my website www.french-nymphs.com were you can buy French style nymphs and ceramic nymphs all tied by my hands.
And if you pass by the north east of France, contact me through my website that will be a pleasure to give you advice on how to fish the Mosel river.
Stanislas Freyheit
About the author
Stanislas Freyheit is a French professional fly-tyer and writer, specialising in the production of hand-tied French original nymphs.
He has travelled in many different countries during the past ten years, fishing with both dry flies and nymphs, and has decided to specialize in the production of nymphs designed to fish what he has called the ‘four fundamental nymphing methods’ namely:
- Czech nymphing
- Klink and dink nymphing
- French nymphing
- Sight nymphing
You can find his tungsten and ceramic nymphs HERE ( www.french-nymphs.com) Stanislas also shares his fly fishing experiences on a colourful blog HERE ( describing ten years of nymphing around the world in texts, pictures and tutorial videos.