Tour de Fly

When people picture fly fishing in Europe, perhaps they imagine the chalk streams of the UK or Euro nymphing for grayling in the east. Probably what they don’t think of is someone hurtling down a mountain road on their bike, a large baguette strapped to the handle bars and a bizarre assortment of camping gear and fly rods poking out the back. I certainly drew some strange looks, particularly far from the rivers, like on the coastline roads near Venice.

After the 2025 World Fly Fishing champs in the Czech Republic, I set off on my mountain bike with a very loose plan, limited funds, and a plane ride home booked in two months’ time.

AUSTRIA

My trip began on the banks of the Goiserer Traun in the Austrian alps, a famous location for trophy grayling. Many grayling populations in Europe have been negatively impacted over the past 10 years by a combination of increasingly powerful flood events and predators such as cormorants. The Goiserer Traun seems to be an exception, flowing cold and clear from Lake Hallstatt before making its way into the Danube near Linz.

The Traun in this section is large and similar in size to the Tongariro, but with a slower gradient and a clearer, but green tinged water. The fishing was completely different too, with downstream Euro nymphing for the grayling using small neon tag flies and a white egg being particularly effective. The latter (rather unusual and controversial) fly was suggested by my Slovenian mates, and worked well given its similarity to bread fed to the local geese.

Although I caught plenty of New Zealand sized wild rainbow trout (a rarity in Europe), the main attraction was targeting the big grayling. Unfortunately we don’t have grayling at home, so whenever I get the opportunity I love fishing for them on my travels. I caught three grayling over 50cm (the trophy mark), with many of the larger fish coming during the late evening in a rain storm induced frenzy. It was the best grayling fishing I have experienced in Europe, which created quite the false sense of expectation before the rest of my trip really began.

SLOVENIA

After leaving the Traun I spent five days riding along small roads, over mountain passes and through pretty Austrian villages on my way to Slovenia. To reach the border I rode over the Loibl Pass, which was at the top of a very steep climb in the middle of a long mountain tunnel. On one side I was in Austria and the next Slovenia, a strange experience — in New Zealand the borders are all ‘overseas’.

During my time in Slovenia I stayed and fished with my mate Luka Pesjak from the Slovenian fly fishing team. Luka was kind enough to lend me essential gear like waders and a net, which I didn’t have with me on my bike.

On the first day Luka took me to the Soca Valley, an incredibly beautiful and historic place. The valley has a sombre past, and while hunting in the mountains above the river Luka has found bunkers, army helmets and bullet casings from the major battles fought in the area during WW1. We spent the day in the rivers below, fishing for marble trout, walking slowly and sight fishing for any active fish as if we were back together in the backcountry of New Zealand.

Slovenia is famous for its clear water, marble trout and grayling, and I was genuinely shocked at the water clarity. The Soca in particular is the clearest river I have ever seen, with water so blue it was difficult to work out where the air ended and the water began. Spotting fish there was easy, but catching them was another story completely. The first marble trout I tried to catch was sitting two metres deeper than I thought and it took a lot of work to get the fly down to it. In Slovenia only one fly is allowed, which added to the challenge.

Marble trout are an incredibly strange fish, sort of like a weirder, more aggressive, larger and cagier brown trout. They love to hide under boulders and in deep pools during the day, and so we cast large streamers into places that we couldn’t see into. Most of the time the effort was fruitless, but occasionally one would materialise as if from out of thin air. In the net they look prehistoric, with strange mottled patterns, a bit like an old reptilian fish from ages gone by.

The big Sava River upstream from Kranj was another favourite of mine, mainly for its grayling fishing. Although the water was high during my first visit, fish rose as the light faded and I did manage to catch a 50cm grayling on a dry fly. It was one of the highlights of my time in Slovenia, and in the following days I enjoyed nymphing for grayling and wild rainbows when the water level dropped. The Sava was also the first place I saw and hooked a hucho, which is an experience I won’t forget in a hurry.

Slovenian rivers flowing into the Adriatic such as the Soca hold marble trout, while those flowing into the Danube basin like the Sava have hucho. These fish grow to well over a metre in length, predating on any poor fish that get in their way. I saw several huge hucho one evening in a large pool, waiting to hunt under the full moon.

Seeing fish of that size in a river helped me understand why Luka braves the snow and freezing temperatures to catch them with his 12-weight switch rod during the winter hucho season. I accidentally hooked two while nymphing with my 11-foot 2-weight. The power of a metre-plus fish with the full river flow behind was a thrill that didn’t last long, but was incredible to experience for a brief moment.

NORTHERN ITALY

I rode to Milan during the following week via Trieste, the Venetian coastline and Verona. This cycle leg was more difficult due to the extreme heat which followed me into the Dolomites on my next fishing trip.

I spent four days with my Italian mate Lorenzo Nateralli and some of his close friends, fishing in the Trentino area in late June. Combatting the heat was made enjoyable by a combination of wet wading in sandals, swimming, and consuming an ungodly amount of the incredibly tasty local gelato.

Usually the late afternoon and evening was the best period for fishing, so the middle of the day was reserved for a lengthy lunch and Italian espressos instead. Fishing in Italy was about so much more than just the fish. Local cuisine, meeting friends and drinking coffee were of equal importance, and the fishing days often finished late at night after a drive home through the mountains.

The early summer heat wave brought with it another problem too — snow melt — which made many of the best places unfishable. This problem was new for me, and I found it very interesting to learn about just how good the fishing can be for huge marble trout, hybrids, brown trout and grayling. Unfortunately, the best rivers are only good during short and seemingly inconsistent periods, mainly after stable weather in March/April and during September/October.

One stream we drove past was rumoured to be so full of big grayling that a beginner could catch 100 in a day during good conditions. However, the stream only ran clear on seemingly random days about 10 times per year, and so neither Lorenzo nor his friends had fished it to confirm if the rumours were true.

Lorenzo and his friend Gulio managed to locate several short stretches in between inlets of snow melt that were running clear, and so I was able to get a taste of fishing on one of their favourite rivers. I caught a lot of wild browns and rainbows, as well as plenty of hybrids (the result of breeding between marble trout and introduced browns). There was concern over the ‘watering down’ of marble trout genetics in the area, which Roberto (another mate of Lorenzo’s), was attempting to preserve in his local river by releasing marble trout fingerlings bred from wild fish.

The only large marble trout I caught in Italy was after an evening thunderstorm which dirtied the water and brought the river to life. To catch a really huge marble you need to know exactly where they live and be lucky to find one that’s out feeding. In many pools we fished, Lorenzo would show me the places where marbles hide, and tell me the size of the fish that lived there. Usually he or a friend had hooked it, and in some cases they had been measured (up to a metre in length) during electro fishing surveys. I can only imagine that hooking a 90cm marble trout on the thin tippet we were fishing would have ended similarly to my hucho in Slovenia.

FRENCH ALPS

In 2024 I fished in the WFFC in the Pyrenees, and so I thought I had some idea of what to expect in France. Actually, knowing where to go turned out to be a lot more complicated than I had imagined. It wasn’t simply the case of just buying a licence, cycling to a nice looking river and catching a bunch of fish.

To get to France I followed a stage of the Tour de France 2024 on my bike, which I rode up and over the Col du Galibier into Valloire. The numerous long mountain passes gave me plenty of time to question every equipment choice I’d made, which weighed heavily on my legs. I am a big fan of Le Tour, and so I planned to be in the area to watch some stages in the coming days. However, my next stop in a small town called Albertville was strictly a fishing detour.

Haphazard research had told me that the Isere river in Albertville was my best shot to catch big grayling in the area, and so that’s where I’d headed. My plan was going great until a huge thunderstorm soaked my tent with rain and hail all night on the evening I arrived. Night turned to day with each lightning flash, and I had plenty of time that night in my tent for the fishing excitement to wear away.

During the two days I spent there, I rode up and down watching a high and muddy river, with more effort spent trying to dry my wet gear than fly fishing.

Cycle touring and fly fishing in a foreign country turned out to be much more challenging than I first thought. Escaping a dirty river to the next valley to simply check the water colour involved climbing a 2000-metre mountain pass on my bike. As you can imagine I was a little less exuberant than usual to try different spots during the day. It also made me extra grateful for the local knowledge and help from my mates in Italy and Slovenia.

I spent several more days in France searching for good places to fish in the alps while riding riverside trails, holding my fly rod like a jousting pole in one hand. The rivers were a complex array of permanently closed waters, fishable spots, private stretches and special ‘no kill’ areas.

The closed waters were due to unstable river levels which made angling dangerous. Dams and hydro-electric plants seemed to be everywhere, and even in the fishable stretches you had to stay alert in case the river started to rise. I found that disconcerting, and given the fishing I’d done was rather average anyway, I decided to abandon the rivers for a new adventure.

I’d had an incredible time sight-fishing in the high mountain lakes of the French Pyrenees the year before, and so I felt pretty optimistic as I climbed a steep road (more of a goat track really) high into the alps near Tigne. The weather in July was unusually cold and stormy, and getting to the small lake I’d found involved a steep hike through a boulder field in the hail. It was so much colder than my single warm top, beanie and thin hoodless cycling jacket were designed for, and as I climbed I was questioning if I’d bitten off a lot more than I could chew.

As I reached the top the clouds parted, revealing a magnificent alpine lake full of wild brown trout. I stood on a small rock in the evening above a shallow mud flat, watching for cruising fish and laying a trap with my dry fly at regular intervals. Below the lake, the alpine creek was teeming with brookies, and they too loved any dry fly they saw. The fishing reminded me more of Colorado than the technical French brown trout in the rivers below.

Following my travels in the alps, I caught the train to London and the long flights home. While New Zealand is a fly fishing paradise, high alpine lakes full of dry-fly eating browns, rivers with big grayling and aggressive marble trout might be the only things missing. I can’t wait to go back and fish for them again.