Fly Fishing Fabisch, the Weekly Picture Archive 2 - 2018

There are beats that are open to fishing only from May 1st to September 30th and closed the entire rest of the year. If you own the fishing rights for a particular stretch you can fish whenever the season for the species you target is not closed by law, but it may be advisable to refrain from fishing anyway. On March 1st the season for brown trout has officially opened, but the fish are still staying very deep, they´re very slim and full of leeches. Their situation is bound to improve rapidly as soon the weather gets better. I wish you all a wonderful season in 2018!

The area of the Oyster´d mouth offers several highlights for fly fishers. For one there is flyfishing for king salmon jacks. Jacks are male fish that have spent one winter less at sea than the youngest females of their species. King salmon jacks weight between 5 and 10 pounds and are lots of fun on a seven weight fly rod. You may also flyfish for Coho on the beach using little silver colored streamers. Just look for surface activity and cast your fly where you find it.

As you can see on the photograph, vegetation is still rather drab in April. Well, for once this makes it somewhat easier to swing a flyrod, on the other side it doesn´t provide much cover for anglers. Both will change in time during the season. These clinics are always designed to enable participants to find their own ways on the river. We also teach a little entomology and in April and May we show the nymphs of the famous Green Drake (Ephemera Danica). Starting in June, they will start to hatch, and only smaller specimens will still be available as nymphs.

This year´s vacation starts rather early, to be precise 6 weeks from now. From Nuremberg via Amsterdam to Vancouver, not for the first time. Then I´ll drive a heavy SUV to Whitehorse, where a large motorhome will be waiting for me. From there I´ll spend a few weeks between Whitehorse and Dawson looking for a claim where I might do some prospecting for gold next year. As I have so far never fished the Yukon, I´ll bring a flyrod for sure. The fishing license for the year is supposed to cost around € 30.-.

The trout of Lake Constance will grow to enormous sizes, this goes for lake-run browns as well as rainbows, locally called Lake-Constance- steelhead. Better conditions for lake-run browns have only been created when they were almost facing extinction. Twice, I have had the opportunity to fish the Rhine near the mouth of the Ill. The fish I caught were very pretty, but none of the famous "monsters" took my fly.

Next comes the Tiroler Ache; its spring is in Austria and it runs into Lake Chiemsee. This makes for 8 major rivers within 80 km, not counting the smaller ones. Almost all of these rivers can be fished if you purchase a day permit, provided they´re fishable at all. If you take a look at all the snow that is still up in the mountains, you can figure out the dimension of spring runoff due as soon as temperatures rise a little further. A coiuple of years ago spring runoff in Berchtesgaden was due roughly from Mid-April to the end of May, but - as always - give and take a few weeks.

As if to make things even harder for the Pegnitz, enormous quantities of water are being "harvested" from the Pegnitz. Once the pumps are being turned on, you can watch the water level fall as far as 20 cm. Along the shores a lot of what is supposed to be the river bottom runs dry, and millions of nymphs, scuds, and other food sources for trout and grayling die along the whole length of the river. What is happening is a stinking shame! The Wiesent has always been ahead of the Pegnitz as far as food sources for salmonids are concerned, but the Pegnitz keeps falling back farther and farther. If rivers could scream, you´d need hearing protection in the Pegnitz valley.

      ✆ DE   011 49 9126 288640,   Fax 011 49 9126 288643,     Ⓒ Wolfgang Fabisch