The Northern California Fly Fishing Board

Picked up our rental car--an Opel Astra station wagon--at the Ljublana airport and immediately headed to the Julian Alps in the Northwest corner of Slovenia. I'd been there once before, about five years ago, and all the good things I remembered were reinforced during the second visit. Not only are the Julian Alps one of the most beautiful parts of Europe (or even the world) that I've ever seen, but traveling through Slovenia is surprisingly easy, comfortable, and inexpensive. The Slovenians are my kind of people--capable, outdoorsy, friendly--a wonderful mix of Swiss-Austrian efficiency and Mediterranean laid-backness.

The rivers in Slovenia have traditionally been managed by local fishing clubs that have kept fish populations healthy. The fishing rules are often more restrictive than many catch and release waters in the US--not only barbless hooks, but single flies only with no splitshot or other weights other than what is contained in the fly itself. Daily fishing permits in the Soca River Valley are also expensive--50 to 70 euros per day--which also reduces fishing pressure. The permits are some of the coolest looking and most useful that I've seen anywhere.

The main river in this area is the Soca, known for it's glacial blue color (coincidentally the same color as a local flavor of bubble yum).

A number of tributaries of the Soca also provide good fishing. The rivers contain rainbows (McCloud stock, I believe), browns, grayling, and an indigenous species of trout supposedly unique to these waters, the Marbled Trout. The Marbled Trout in the Soca grow quite large, sometimes exceeding 10 lbs, although these fish are reportedly difficult to fish except by using streamers at first and last light.

After a couple days of rain and checking out the town of Kobarid, we moved upstream to a place called Pristava Lapena--a former farm operation turned inn near the confluence of the Soca and the Lapena.

There had been more anglers on the Soca than I expected, but I managed to find a section of the smaller Lapena to myself for an afternoon.

Fishing a royal stimulator I missed a couple strikes then brought my first fish to hand, a fat 14" rainbow.

And then a small brown:

Caught a few more rainbows and a brown then spotted a larger fish in the tail of a pool. The trout ignored my stimulator on the surface so I switched to a conehead nymph which tempted my first (and only) marbled trout of the trip.

The Soca and it's tributaries could easily consume a week or two of fishing but we had plans to keep moving so the next day we headed out of the Soca Valley. We passed the Unec, a famed spring creek that I'd fished on my first trip to Slovenia, and a couple hours later crossed the border into Croatia. This section of the border is defined by the Kupa River, a large spring creek that holds grayling, trout, and at times Danube Salmon. As in Slovenia, this river and its tributaries are managed by a local fishing club,

although the daily permits are less expensive (around $15)--I bought mine in a local pub about fifty yards from the border crossing.

That evening I fished the Kupica, a tributary of the Kupa. I fished exclusively with a small stimulator--there were caddis on the water and fish rising--and immediately started catching grayling.

Caught a dozen or so grayling and a few browns just below a local powerhouse.

That turned out to be it for fishing, but not for scouting the streams. The next day we checked out the River Gacka, another famed Croatian spring creek. I'd read about this place in Tony Pawson's Fly Fishing Around the World in which the author devotes a chapter to fishing Yugoslavia, which at the time of writing included all the countries I visited during my trip. During this period (late 70s/early 80s) anglers would gather at the Hotel Gacka, on the banks of the river, and fish for huge rainbows and browns that grew in what was described as one of the most productive waters on the planet. Besides this reference I hadn't been able to find much information about the Hotel Gacka other than its historical location. We managed to track the place down and found these remains (later we confirmed the place was destroyed during the war).

The Gacka itself was a beautiful, deep, rich looking spring-fed river--although I didn't see as many trout as I expected, and no anglers during the middle of the day.

Next day we crossed over into Bosnia and found the River Una--another beautiful river similar in size and appearance to the Gacka. We had lunch at a restaurant on the bank of the Una,

then followed the river upstream to where the smaller Unac feeds in to the Una. We stopped at the bridge over the Unac, and found a group of anglers just upstream.

Normally when I see fly-fishermen clustered close together with so much promising water upstream I think they don't know what they're doing. But in this case--knowing that several anglers in Bosnia have been killed by stepping on unexploded mines--it occurred to me they knew exactly what there were doing.

Just downstream of the confluence of the Una and Unac a bridge reflected the recent violence in Bosnia:

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Last few days were spent in and around Dubrovnik and then in Montenegro's Bay of Kotar--no fly-fishing but spectacular towns and coastal areas regardless. I've heard if you head into the mountains of Montenegro there are some beautiful, mostly untouched streams. . .maybe next time?