Recently, our family had the chance to spend a few days in the Jura region of France – we absolutely love this area, the landscape is beautiful…. neat little towns and villages, the wine and cheese tastes great…. and you can fish!

But we had not expected to end up in one of the hottest weeks in years, in many places of Central Europe the all-time-records for temperature were broken. The major rivers of the area, Loue and Doubs were low and much too warm for my taste. Unfortunately, this has been the genereal trend for several years now. Places, where I had seen trout some years back now only hold chub and catfish and some barbel maybe. Nevertheless we were happy to see, that the upper courses of these rivers and the little tributaries which spring directly from of the limestone cliffs are still flowing well and are very cold despite the air temperature.

One of the most impressive places surely is the source of the Loue River and the adjacent canyon, a truely magical place that you have to see when you are in the area. But that doesn’t mean that fish is garanteed…

Although the cold water was splashing beautifully downhill, I caught nothing on the upper Loue River.

My hopes were with the smaller streams of the area, where I had been successful in the years before. I planned to fish the last evening and took some time to explore and select a good spot. But somehow, fate seemed to have turned against me.

It began in the restraurant that evening, when the waiter somehow forgot to hand over our order to the chef, and we waited for our dinner quite a while, until the mistake was finally discovered. Instead of starting at 7pm, it was just after 8pm when I finally sat in the car, driving up to the spot where I hoped to be successful. Arriving there, I was shocked to see that some other fisher was already standing exactly in “my” spot… A little devil on my shoulder told me to just jump the pool 200 yards upstream, but the angel on my other shoulder protested loudly! While the two fellas were still debating I discovered that someone was already fishing the upstream spot aswell… what was wrong today!? Never in the past had I seen any other fishermen here…. anyway, there was no solution other than to drive to a different stretch of that same stream… I had never been there, but on the map, it looked not too bad.

I parked the car on the side of a gravel road and walked to the stream where the app “geopeche” indicated, that my fishing licence began. While I was still trying to tie a fly to my tippet, an old grumpy lady with a huge dog appeared on the other bank. The dog jumped the pool in front of me and started to bark, while the lady told me that I had no right to fish here. “No, no,…” I told her in French, “I bought a fishing licence, and the map indicates that I am allowed to fish here”. She insisted that this was her water, and I had no right to fish here… she did not seem like she wanted to help in any way, but I walked over to her, showed here my map and licence… to no other result. Now either the offical map of the fishing department was wrong or that lady, and I felt, that the remaining time before complete darkness would not suffice to find out where the mistake was. So I thanked the grumpy lady and walked through the forest on the river bank upstream, beyond the point she had discribed as the end of her stretch of water.

It had become pretty dusky already, but some fish were rising in the pool ahead of me. There was one hour left until it was too dark, and I was a bit frustrated by now. I admit that I am somewhat an addict if it comes to fishing. While some people claim that the fish is not central to their fishing experience, I must claim the opposite. Fishing without catching anything ist not satisfying at all… with the exception of salmon fishing maybe.

The evening had reached a point, where even the tiniest minnow would have made me happy. But the rising fish ignored my flies for the most part. I changed from my regular mid-sized CDC-flies to tiny CDCs, from mayflies to caddis, emergers, ants… even when the seemed to take the fly, the hook did not set… probably the turned in the last instant because something was wrong about the fly still…

I waded to the next pool, but the story unfolded in a similar way… until I finally found a dark, relatively small parachute which they seemed to like. The first small trout was a salvation. And shortly after, a better fish of something around 13 inches made it into the net. Both trout were of the typical local variety of brown trout, which are sometimes refered to as “zebra-trout”.

The last pool before I planned to quit and return to the car, had a nice inlet, where two or three times, a fish rose. I stood in the shallow water watching and waiting, when a big trout of at least 18 inches swam towards me, turned around just one yard in front of me, and stood there in the current. I was thunderstruck and tried to tipp the fly towards the trout, but it soon dissappeared into the deep and did not return.

So this time, there was no last minute fish, no giant trout which the hero of the story takes home in his memory… but rather a restless, wired something which made its way back to the car, trying to find the mistake. But too many things had gone wrong this evening, there was no answer to the question what I could have done better. Had I been more satisfied if the big trout had not appeared at all? After all, I had caught two beautiful, native trout… strange how narrow the gap is, between the feeling of success and defeat, and what little things decide about it.

A week later, I must somewhat laugh about my own feelings that evening. In the end, it was an exciting evening, even though it did not turn out as planned. And maybe next year I will get another chance, and maybe I will catch a big trout then….

 

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