Tuesday 1 October 2013

Slovenia 2013

Way back in Feb I managed to get myself involved in a six day trip to Slovenia which I returned from last week. This was my first ever organised fly fishing trip abroad, and it turned out to be a stunner.

The rivers where we fished varied from big powerful waters, to tiny streams tree lined streams, with some urban streams thrown in too. The bulk of the catch consisted of rainbow trout but there were some browns and marble trout also. The marble trout is indigenous to Slovenia, and rainbow are stocked by fisheries as they don't breed at the same time as the marbles, and so the marble strain remains pure (this is also why browns aren't stocked as they breed at the same time as marbles resulting in hybrids). There also adriatic grayling with beautiful golden bellies, and I managed to catch all varieties except the grayling - this is one of the many reasons I will be returning!


 Mountain stream

 Brown/marble hybrid

 Fishing a deep flow using v. heavy nymphs

 Into a decent rainbow

 Rainbow on a streamer

The pictures below give an idea of the scenery in Slovenia. We fished a variety of waters but all were in absolutely stunning environments.







The majority of my fishing was upstream nymphing, switching to dry fly if the fish were rising. All fishing is single barbless fly only, which can be challenging, but it is done to protect the fish numbers. From what I gather historical almost everything was taken, but now there is definitely a healthy population.

 Rainbow from a stream that didn't look big enough to hold fish this size!

My fish of the trip, marble trout around 2.25 pounds