Fly-Fishing in the Italian Alps, Part 2: Blowouts, high water, and mystery trout on the Swiss border
Can you help identify this strange trout variant? Salmo truta helvetica?
It’s the most wonderful time of the year here in Oregon, as the weather cools and all sorts of fish get more active. Steelhead are pushing up the Deschutes, coho are in the Clackamas, and sea-run cutthroat abound at the coast. I hope you’re enjoying the changing seasons and getting some time in on the water.
Before we get to fall, though, here’s a flashback to last month’s Italian adventure, this in the north east part of the country, Trentino-Alto Adige / Südtirol. If you missed Part 1, all about the rules and regulations around Italian fly fishing, you can find it here.
n.b. If you're reading this and have expertise around fly fishing in Italy that would be helpful, or you can correct any of my likely plentiful errors, please leave a comment!
Big nymphing
By the time we got into our third week of vacation, I had managed to sneak away from the family five or six times, enough to start to figure out trout fishing in Italy. Or so I thought.
Across Piedmont, and now in Trentino-Alto Adige / Südtirol, I’d found success with techniques that were first devised there many years ago, but now common worldwide: nymphing, tight-line Euro-style, occasionally under a suspender. (That’s a classy way to say bobber, though the New Zealand wool system was the most effective.)
I prefer fishing dry flies. Doesn’t everyone? We were mostly in crystal-clear water, where big trout held in knee-deep pockets. Fantasizing about topwater takes as I rigged up one morning made me lose concentration enough to blow tying the simple clinch knot three times.
But with a few notable exceptions, fish on the larger rivers stubbornly refused to rise to dry flies. It was excruciating. Whether this was common, or a reaction to the heat of summer, I never found out. Like a lot of stuff in Europe, things appearing similar to the U.S. contain nuance to discover.
But then there were smaller rivers. And an intervention from Mother Nature.
The Mother of All Blowouts
Let's start several days earlier, in the town of Merano. I was talking with the proprietor of Jawag, a hunting and fishing store that serves as the permit warden for the stretch of the Passer river outside of town that I had fished a few days prior.
In returning my Passer ticket we were doing a bit of a debrief, and I mentioned we were heading up toward Stelvio and spending our last few days in a mountain town called Sulden. I wanted to fish the Etsch (Adige), another famed river with a lot of beats seemingly on offer. He tut-tutted a bit, looking for the words, and then between his decent English, my bad Italian (”é molto turbido?”) and his native German we arrived at an understanding: There’s a big-ass glacier at Sulden that pukes concrete milkshake of glacial silt and sediment into the Adige, and anything below that is unfishable until temps drop and the glacier freezes again. Sort of like the relationship between the White river and the Deschutes in Oregon, but turbocharged.
Indeed he was right. And a few days later, in Sulden, I found the exact source of the turbidity that persists hundreds of kilometers downstream. At least one of them, anyway: The second-largest glacier in the Trentino-Alto Adige region, Vendretta di Solda, smack dab between the Ortler and Gran Zebrù peaks, getting smaller and smaller each year as temperatures rise.
This was the view up from the suspension bridge below, as a massive load of glacial sediments cascade down the mountainside.
