The Risle, Normandy

Ask any angler about favourite fly fishing books and Charles Ritz’s ‘A Fly Fisher’s Life’ will feature prominently. The heir of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Charles Ritz had the luxury of being able to spend a lot of his time fishing, often in the company of famous guests like Ernest Hemingway. Ritz most enjoyed fishing the River Risle, in Normandy, and believed that if you could catch a trout from the Risle you could catch a trout anywhere.

I believe there are only around 15 chalkstreams in Normandy with the Risle and Andelle considered the continental equivalent of the Test and Itchen. On a clear day you can see the Normandy coast from England but thanks to the language barrier, the French chalkstreams have felt as foreign as silver in Ancient Egypt.

At long last however I took the plunge and whisked my family off on the ferry to Dieppe in the first week of September. On the cards was a week's holiday in the heart of Normandy to soak in the local culture and culinary delights, see the sights, and of course, spend a day or two fishing. My brother would travel down by train from his home in Belgium to join us.

It was immediately apparent from the moment we drove off the ferry that time has largely forgotten about Normandy. Compared to England's crammed and crumbling roads a pleasant sense of freedom was delivered by excellent road conditions and very few cars. As we left the coast for the interior the region began to reveal a pleasant, ancient charm. Gently undulating hills concealed farms and woodland and the odd, grand chateau. Scattered villages and towns grew outwards from prominent church steeples, where bells pealed to maintain a sense of routine. The odd tractor on the roads slowed the rural pace even further.

We arrived at our accommodation in the evening, a lovely old former coach house in the tiny blink-and-miss-it village of St Aubin de Bonneval. Abodes in Normandy are constructed in a uniform style of red brick and grey slate roofs, and all of them seem within a wind's breath of collapsing. Our cottage was run by the inimitable Arkadi de Rakoff, an ex TV writer and passionate fly fisherman who spends his retirement between London and Normandy when not visiting the great fly fishing meccas of the world - he was in the midst of preparing for a trip to Montana to celebrate a wedding anniversary. 

'Kadi' came to greet us and suggested that he take us off to the Risle the following day but only after 5pm when the fishing might begin to pass muster - he apologised for a hot dry summer, low water, sluggish trout, and all that. Besides, this was the 'French way', where the prevailing sense is that anyone with sense wouldn’t venture to cast a dry fly until the late evening.  And so we went along with that.

Looking back, our visit to this famous river then took place at whirlwind speed, with our time eroded by a drive of forty-five minutes, a pleasant chat with the owner of the beat, and Kadi very helpfully proceeding for the next hour to walk us down the length of the beat, showing us the various holding places where trout might be expected to be found. The Risle was wide and in places deep, quite reminiscent of the middle reaches of the Test downstream of Stockbridge, and with the evening advancing I had never quite so itched to let loose with a fly! 

Kadi then left us to it. With the clock ticking down to nightfall, I barely had time to set-up, land a grayling, and then try unsuccessfully for the few fish which rose in the moment when the sky turned from purple to black. An unusually large full moon rose in the south and helped us to see the dimpling of fish, as if a light rain fell to the water. When the takes came to the fly there was no resistance. I suspect they were tiddlers too small to take in the hook. Bryce and I drove back in the dark, aware of the general direction to our lodging but not knowing where in the context of Ritz's writings we had just sampled our first encounter with the Risle. The moment had passed by in a big blur.

For the next few days, between rain soaked visits to the D-Day landing sites and various child-friendly attractions, and some excellent meals out, we couldn’t help but feel a little short-changed from our visit to the Risle, so my brother and I arranged to return on Friday, the last day of our stay. By now we had done our research - when we could because the cottage, mostly pleasingly and only a little frustratingly, had no wifi. We were aware that 'our' section of the river was the next upstream from Aclou where Ritz wrote that the river provided the best fishing. That fact provided a nice shot in the arm and I took along to the riverbank on Friday my copy of Ritz's book as a symbolic gesture of sorts. As far as literary fly fishing pilgrimages go, this felt comparable to my visits to Plunket Greene's Bourne and Kite's Avon. 

Marking a change from the variable weather in the week, Friday was a fabulous day of still sunshine. With the entire day ahead of us our chat with the owner was relaxed. Guillame, sporting a thick moustache, heavy accent, and large doses of charm, seemed the essential caricature of a Frenchman. With a waggle of his finger he firmly disagreed with Ritz's assessment that the fishing downstream was better than his. His section of the river has been in his family's hands since the 1930s and whilst he had no personal knowledge that Ritz had fished it, assumed that he must have in the time that his grandfather ran things. A modern bridge hundreds of feet tall now spans the valley at Ritz’s preferred spot, and the lady who used to host his fishing parties has long since left this mortal realm. Looking down the valley I could see the bridge in the distance and I did my best to remove it from my mental image to gain a sense of the river as it was in Ritz's time.

We decided to first focus our efforts on a section of the river split in two by an island, and particularly the downstream end of the island, where the divergent stream battled with gravity and eventually joined the main river again in two places. Not more than 50m downstream of the island a substantial carrier entered the river and we thus had in around 75m of water three places with a good churn of water, where it seemed apt to drift a sunken nymph. 

To kick things off, we settled on the middle pool and I flicked my nymph into the water from the bank mainly in the aim of releasing my line before I entered the water to fish up to the meeting point of rivers. I allowed my nymph to be carried downriver and just near the end of its drift the indicator stopped dead and I was into a fish. My brother expressed some disbelief at a fish on the most benign of first casts but his doubts were soon laid to rest when the fish pulled its way downstream into the carrier's outflow - and then the race was on to catch up with it! I had no choice but to enter the water and wade out towards the far bank, and then downstream, to avoid the dangerously broiling influx of carrier. My brother followed on the bank and eventually we came together where he could net the fish, a plump trout bearing the silvery hue of a sea trout. There is nothing like a trout with the first cast to settle the nerves and send one's expectations for the day racing!

We returned to the middle pool and Bryce cast his nymph into the water. After several goes he finally put his nymph into the sweet spot, hooking up with a whopper of a grayling. It leaped acrobatically from the water in a series of three jumps, shivering its body like a marlin. On the third splash down Bryce's line went limp and he was rather crestfallen. He has never caught a grayling before. If this hefty grayling wasn't 3 lbs I would gamble my house on it being north of 2½ lb. It was so large that I secretly questioned if he will ever have the good fortune to encounter its like again.

From the same run of water I winkled out another more modest grayling. Guillame had mentioned that grayling were very rare in his section of the Risle. Ritz had considered the grayling a far more difficult creature to catch than the trout and whilst we had done nothing more special than to drift an appropriately weighted nymph down the current, it felt pretty remarkable that we had tussled with as many grayling in two visits than had reportedly been caught from this section of the river in two decades!

Bryce then caught a lovely brown trout - only his second brown trout ever - and as a tyro to river fishing he then went about quoting Ritz’s comment about catching trout from the Risle to anybody who would listen!  I could see the fly fishing bug biting him and was very pleased for him. 

Whilst still concerned with the middle pool, I waded to the far bank so that I could approach the inlet of water from a different angle. I cast my nymph forward and it settled in a little area of slack water. After mending the line I left the fly to its rather peaceful hibernation and watched the indicator intently. I struck at the merest movement in the tuft of wool and observed a flash of gold. This fish felt different to a trout and, recalling Kadi's comments when he showed us the river, yelled out to my brother, "I think it might be a barbel!" I have never caught one of those. This fish would simply not give up. It did not like the look of my net and on three or four occasions when I thought I might coax it into net it raced away, stripping yards of line with it. By now I could see it was likely a chub and when it relented at last, assessed that it was probably the best chub I have yet caught. 

It proved in the morning to be one of those days when the fish were very interested in the fly, with a realistic expectation that any drift of our flies might account for a fish. It was very exciting and my brother's enthusiasm was infectious. 

We paused for a fine lunch on the riverbank of camembert cheese, baguette, ham and cured sausage, washed down with a bottle of the region’s celebrated brut cider. 

I caught an energetic trout after lunch from the outflow of the carrier but then, as is often the case, that unseen switch was flicked and the fish ceased to show an interest in the fly for the rest of the afternoon. We had promised to return to the cottage by 5pm to assist with packing before our return home, and this time we left the Risle in buoyant spirits and without any unanswered questions. I could see completely why Ritz had a special affinity with this river.

We will certainly return in the future – perhaps to fish the region’s other major chalkstream, the Andelle.