Slovenia

“I know you, you fucking crazy guy, still no car?” I am in the lobby of the Hvala Hotel in Kobarid, and the big Slovene Alex is full of good cheer. It’s not every four star hotel in the world where you walk in for the second time, they swear at you. Which is a pity, it’s just what the Savoy needs.

Some destinations speak loud to the fisher. This is one of them. Slovenia is a pretty, mountainous country, with cute little cottages and welcoming people. The food is very good and the capital looks like something printed on a chocolate box. But even if none of this were true, if it looked like Stalingrad in 1945, and the people were rude and the food crap, fishermen would still flock here year after year, because the Soča is the only river in the world with marble trout. It gives a rare, holy grail quality to the trip; whatever the fishing, unless you catch marble trout, your visit to Slovenia will have to count as a failure.

This river, the Soča, called the Isonzo in Italian, was a geographical divide which formed a front almost for the duration of World War I. Kobarid was the centre of that combat. The river itself was what held the sides apart. It was an old-fashioned battle over a geographical feature which lasted the length of the war. As you fish the water you can see why. The water flows very, very quickly, is mostly very deep, and the sides of the river are quite extreme. A well-placed cannon in the hills above would stop any notions of fording or building a bridge. So they died of the cold, they died in skirmishes, and in big pushes to take inches of enemy soil organised by distant, incompetent and incredibly fat generals. The numbers are unknown, but certainly well over half a million men died fighting for possession of this river. The museum at Kobarid is excellent, awarded European Museum of the Year when it opened. Don't miss the film (available in English, Italian and Slovene) which clearly explains the conflict. Then trivialise the whole piece of business by indulging in your favourite sport and throwing four white feathers and a hook on the river for a week.

As I walked to the river, to the very bridge which formed the centre of the conflict between Italy and Austro-Hungary, I pictured Ernest Hemingway walking here almost a hundred years before me. He simply must have walked where I was, as it was the only road through Kobarid, and that is where he was stationed when he volunteered to be an ambulance driver. When he was wounded, his convalescence was at Kobarid. I pictured him walking here. When I turned along the river, the path had nettles crowding it. I raised my short-sleeved arms, as many must have raised them before in the same spot, some to avoid nettles, others to surrender, and I thought of them, and how lucky I was to be walking to the Soča to fish. More than that, even if there were no sadness attached to the Soča, I would still be incredibly lucky to fish it.

Below the bridge that was so much fought over, there is a huge pool teeming with fish. I fished it for a long time with not a bite. I put on a sinking tip. Clear water is always, always much deeper than it looks. I never get used to this. So it proved. The sinking tip carried the same fly down, and the fish began to bite. It was swelteringly hot. I had thought that the next day I might put on goggles and swim in this pool to look at the fish and maybe spot a couple of monster marbles in their lies. Just then, a gentle bite, a first fish to hand. Was it a marble trout? Was it 'eckers like: A chub. I had never heard they had them here.

When I dipped my hand in the water to fish this little fellow out, all notions of swimming the next day were put on ice. The water temperature was well below ten degrees.

I caught a big grayling after this. A couple of powerful rainbows followed and it seemed like I was on a magical tour of salmonid species, which, of course, I was hoping to end with a marble trout as big as my leg. Just then this breeze started running down the river from the mountain. It wasn't travelling very fast but it was so cold that I called it a day. Back at the hotel Alex told me that breeze happens every night, and if I want to fish after sunset I'll need arctic gear for that pool.
So day one, blank for marbles.

There is a spit of land opposite one of the best pools on the Soča. The upper Soča is as popular for white water rafting as it is for fishing. For some good reason this beach is where the rafters finish their journey and pack their gear away. I fished it with success even though these monkeys keep coming down the river and splashing out of the water showing no concern for your poor narrator. Now these people are of two types, obviously and immediately identifiable. They are either Austrian or Italian. The behaviour of one group is the opposite of the other. The Italians get out of the water and head deep into the woods to get changed, the Austrians whip off their wetsuits right there on the beach. Boys, girls, doesn't matter; off comes the wetsuit and chit and chat, and light a fag, and dry out and little by little on with the clothes. The Italians, in the meantime, emerge from the woods fully dressed.

I was busy fishing, and if you think I'm a perv, you think I'm a perv, but I challenge any man not to notice a gorgeous 6ft blond woman peel off a wetsuit, jump up and down to dry herself, rub her tits and legs to wipe the water away, and, and, (how I wish it weren't true) squat down and have a piss on the beach in front of me.

So down the river comes this guy in a kayak. Dark haired, and I'm guessing Italian. He holds his position in the water by gently rowing in front of me. A couple of dirty looks from him establish that he feels the river is for rafting and not for nancy-boy fishing. His mate arrives. They turn around and start to discuss what they are going to eat tonight. He says 'Magna' not 'mangiare' and is therefore from Lazio if not Rome. A third dirty look comes my way, and he says to his mate, in clearly audible Italian, 'Look at that turd there, fishing with flies. It doesn't work, that fucker won't catch anything all day, and he's paying for the privilege'. Now I know some pretty acute responses to this in Italian, phrases you won't find in Baedecker's, and even if that weren't so, I had some excellent throwing stones at my feet, but just then, a miraculous thing happened. There was a huge thump on the line, I lifted my rod, and my reel started to scream. The line pulled out in big jerks as a big rainbow thrashed downstream and leapt twice just for extra drama. And whaddaya know? I netted it before cock monkey even got his boat out of the water.

I caught a couple of hybrid brown/marble trout. I also caught my first pure marble trout, but it was very small. I'm not terribly sizeist about fish, but the marble trout is famous for its size and beauty. Back at the Hvala Hotel* they have a stuffed marble trout in the lobby. It is the size of a ten year old kid. So I'm a bit shy about my ten inch thing. That's the only time you'll ever hear a man say such a thing.

* Great food, good wine list. Only sixty euros a night, an easy walk to the river. They’ll cook your catch, so take some of the rainbows out and eat them. Marble trout, incidentally, like most piscivorous salmonids, doesn’t taste so good, and the limit is 70cms! And if you do take one and eat it I’m going to find you and kill you and your family and burn your house to the ground.

On my last day, I got up earlier, hit the river with more purpose, quizzed Alex for longer. I was almost instantly rewarded. An acceptable marble trout was in my hand by noon.

This was what I came here for. And it is special, a thing of rare beauty. I wet my hand so as not to damage its protective film, and picked it out of the water. I sometimes name fish; fish I catch, but more usually fish I miss catching that hold a particular spot in the river. Perhaps it's clear that I almost revere marble trout. I looked down at him and said, out loud, 'Hello Ernest, you are a beautiful, beautiful butterfly'. Then I turned the hook slowly out of him and faced him upstream, and he melted away into the marble water.

Then I hooked a bigger one. You know that scene in Jaws when Roy Schneider suddenly decides the boat isn’t big enough? It wasn’t until I got this beast, his name was Bruce, near my landing net that I realised he was bigger than the aperture of the net. I got his head in and tried a lift, but Bruce didn’t like that and he headed for the deep. I was ready to feel very stupid if he got off. I brought Bruce round to the net again, got the bulk of him over it and tried a gentle lift, and he was in. I was just relieved.

I walked much further downstream. I reached a broad pool with riffles that made fish hard to see. It looked like a good spot. I stopped and looked around. My eyes nearly popped out of my head. Sitting in front of me in six inches of water was a fish far larger than any I have ever caught. Maybe 10lbs. At first I thought it was a particularly dark rainbow, or maybe a huchen, but it was too dark to be a rainbow, had white stripes on its fins like a brook trout. It was a magnificent fish that would have had no chance against me had I simply battered it on the head with a big stick. I wondered why it was sitting there, idling in the shallows where a bear or eagle would surely soon kill it. Finally I noticed the damage. Its eye was hanging outside its socket. This fish had already been attacked. It was dying in the shallows. I stared at it for ten minutes, wondering what had done this damage without inflicting the killer blow. It was hard to leave it, to walk away from such a spectacular fish, but night was coming in, and it was time to make my last few casts on the Soča. If anybody can tell me from the photo what it is, please, please post a reply.

It's funny how you can tell sometimes what species has taken the fly even if you can't see it. It seems counter-intuitive that species is actually as distictive as size when it comes to fight. I hooked a fish. Not big, but with that distinctive fluttery feel that so often means a grayling. The fish came to hand, and I was surprised to be looking at something that was not a grayling. It had an adipose fin, so it was a salmonid, but its body shape was rather diamond like. It was sort of steely pink coloured, but lacked the spots that cover a rainbow. It looked a bit like a rainbow, but I suspected some hybridisation.

I killed it and took it back to the hotel. Alex had seen photos of my marbles and hybrids and rainbows and chub. I showed him my catch. For the first time, he showed pleasure. 'Wow! A wild rainbow. Did it fight like a grayling? These are beautiful, and very good to eat'. It was as well.

The next morning I packed my things up and left. I said goodbye to Alex and he said, “I’ll see you next year, you fucking crazy guy”. He will as well.

Price: €150 for three days.
Price/quality ratio: Room for lots of improvement. We want to catch blocks of marble the size of Michelangelo’s David, not reservoir dogs.
Quality: 8/10. Get rid of the ‘bows.
Species: Mostly rainbows, some marble trout, chub, grayling, brown trout.
Wildlife: Don’t get eaten! Bears, snakes, wild boar, huge snails, eagles, etc.
Tips: The vast pool below the road bridge in Kobarid is excellent.
Getting to Kobarid is far easier from Italy than from Ljublana. From Venice, Mestre, etc. take the train to Gorizia, then get the bus to Kobarid direct.