Ever been fishing and have had the perfect day and want to tell your friends about this amazing place they have to visit? Jindra Lacko tells about one of those places.
As Heraclitus famously tells us, "you can not step into the same river twice; for other waters are ever flowing on to you." One week I attempted to do just that - and not surprisingly I failed, but learnt a valuable lesson on the meaning of fly fishing in the process.
The river in question was upper Vltava, in the mountainous region by the Bavarian border. The border mountains are one of the last vestiges of true wilderness in my rather densely populated homeland. The tumults of the 20th century have first caused the local inhabitants of German ethnicity to leave the Czech lands for Germany proper and then put the area off limits to ordinary Czechs due to its close proximity to the Iron Curtain. The environment has greatly benefited from the forced seclusion, and the area has been declared a National Park. Apart from a little canoe traffic in the early summer it is visited only by some bikers and a few hardy Grayling fishermen, who don't mind the hike to the river through nearly impassable fields of sedge.
On my first visit I travelled to the river alone and encountered it in near perfect fishing conditions. It was mid October, and up in the high country the first signs of coming winter were already well apparent. Most of the trees had shed their leaves and night temperatures started to drop well below freezing. The early season frosts brought in a period of clear and stable weather, so the river had a low but stable flow and was gin clear. By mid-day the riverside warmed up to about 10°C, which brought up some insect activity. A mixed hatch of Baetis mayflies and smallish stoneflies started around 12 o'clock and lasted well into afternoon.
The local pods of Grayling welcomed the hatch as an opportunity to obtain some nutrition before the coming winter and mating season later on in April and May. They eagerly attacked the hatching Ephemera and Plecoptera. The insects were exhausted from their journey to the water surface, and they sat on the film trying to get some warmth and dry their wings. It took a long while for the weak autumn sun to warm them up sufficiently. During this time they were immensely vulnerable, drifting like a fleet of diminutive sail ships on the stately river flow. The Grayling attacked them with unerring precision. Just watching them performing the act of predation was a joy to a natural sciences minded spectator - so efficient were they in eliminating all the visible insects that it became hard to believe how the line of Blue Winged Olives manages to survive the process of emergence and live on to procreate.
As I did expect a hatch of smallish BWOs to be happening at this time of the season I was not taken by a surprise and had several different BWO imitations in my fly box. It took me only a little time to determine that the most appealing of the lot was a #18 Green Quill with CDC wing. The Grayling attacked it with the same reckless abandon as the naturals, and I had a great sport fishing the dry fly. Having caught and released more than two dozen fish, including several over the 40 cm length - which in this region passes as the boundary between a “merely good” and a truly excellent fish - I retired home. I was rather exuberant on the way back to Prague, and I made a decision to return back as soon as possible.
The opportunity presented itself in exactly two days, when two good friends of mine expressed interest to visit the river I was praising to heaven. I promised them an angling experience of lifetime and brought them on a guided trip to the Šumava forests. During the two hours in the car I treated them with the stories of my recent trip, promised to play the perfect host and share with them the contents of my fly boxes, which had proven to be deadly to the local Grayling population just two days ago.
The anticlimax could not be bigger. The weather had shifted just very slightly from my previous trip - a strong wind had started, nothing more. However, this wind brought two very important consequences: it put a definite end to the insect hatch, and thus any surface fish activity and it wreaked havoc of our fly casting.
Having expected a dry fly action on a slow moving stream we made the long trek to the river with only short rods and low class AFTMA lines with very long leaders. These were especially vulnerable to the wind and our flies invariably ended in overhanging vegetation. It was not practical to travel back to the car to our heavier backup rods, so we had to stick to what we had on hand.
To worsen our situation even further the expected hatch failed to materialize. By some sense, unknown to us, the little insects burrowed in the river silt found out that the weather was being unfavorable and decided to postpone their nuptial flight by a few more days. As a result only a handful of duns came floating by, and these failed to stir the Grayling to the killing frenzy we have come to expect. We had some success, but we were able to tempt only the very young fish. Our imitations failed to convince the old Grayling veterans lurking in the deep pools that were supposed to make our day memorable. These simply disappeared, and had we not known them for sure to be here - present, but not interested - we would not have believed the river to hold a fish over 20 centimeters.
Both me and my two friends had suffered badly, both from the sudden gusts of wind and from inactivity of the quality fish. We proceeded to lose a great number of flies in the sedges and willows lining the meandering stream while failing to attract any sizeable fish. But an interesting thing happened - for out of this shared misery rose a strong feeling of unity in our little fishing party. We were in this together, and even though the fishing gods were obviously not favoring us right now, they could not rob us of the sheer enjoyment of being out in the wild on a bright October day, far from the maddening crowds of our bustling capital. It was perhaps better that not one was able to score a decent fish, and thus rise above the rest.
And so out of this seemingly dismal trip a surprise emerged: for even though we failed to catch a single quality fish between the three of us we had a marvellous day out. We endured a day of struggle, swapped a bunch of stories, and shared a rather enjoyable streamside lunch deep in the border forests. The fish being uncooperative had surprisingly small effect on our enjoyment of the trip. If we failed to score we did so in a good company.
So, getting back to the teachings of the old philosopher: I learned that there were many ways to enjoy a day out on the river, and that while having piscatorial success surely helps, it is not the only way to have fun. The river Vltava, flowing ever on and on, in truly Heracleitean fashion, showed me two of her faces in the space of just a few days; both were different and yet very much alike. For both were truly enjoyable, if each for a different reason.
To enjoy more from Jindra please visit his website to read more fishing adventures.
