Urban fishing in Normandy

The Risle seemed every bit the equal of England’s finest chalkstreams, so when our host offered to arrange a day’s fishing on an upstream beat, I leapt at the chance. My fascination with rivers only grows the further upstream I go.

What I wasn’t expecting was a burned‑out crack‑den urban fishing experience.

Bryce and Jacky talk fishing at a burned-out crack den.

We began in steady rain beside a needle factory straight from a Charles Dickens novel. The water ran murky, which I first blamed on the downpour, but later learned is always this way— the riverbed is silty. How the same river could flow gin‑clear over lush weed beds and golden gravels just a few miles downstream remained a mystery.

I was quickly into a modest grayling, and then my brother had the joy of catching his first ever brown trout. It was scarcely longer than his middle finger, but that mattered little. We toasted his maiden catch with some fine local cider at a picnic table beside a bridge. Our celebration took a surreal turn when a pair of octogenarians pulled up, reclined their car seats, and fogged the windows in amorous abandon. The French, it seems, have the notion of romance well in hand.

Bryce's maiden brown trout.

I managed to tempt two sparkling little trout to take a nymph from right beside the needle factory's wall. We both took turns to drift our flies through the enormous, swirling pool that lay ahead but somewhat surprisingly, felt nary a bump.

The river here is overseen by a devoted band of fly anglers, led by their president, Jacky, who greeted us with generosity—offering flies and advice. He told us to follow him in our car to another wide weir pool where he left us with a warning: “Watch out for the Portuguese man next door. He thinks he owns the river and can be a nuisance.”

My brother and I attacked the pool from each bank. Sure enough, Bryce soon whispered that we were being watched. I looked up from my knot to see a man in a Portugal football shirt with an angry scowl. I waved disarmingly. He glared like one of the hounds of hell, then spat contemptuously into the water, and walked away. Perhaps he didn't like the odds of ruffling the feathers of two of us. Left in peace, Bryce’s fly was walloped by something powerful—only for his tippet to snap. Crestfallen, he later learned from a local that the fish was well known, and weighed five and a half pounds.

Nassem fishes the crack den pool.

In the afternoon, Jacky returned and we again followed his car upstream, past a sprawling sewage treatment works. Jacky had invited us "to catch some big trout in the warm shit with little midges" but we had politely declined. He took us further upstream to a wide pool beside the burned‑out ruins of a mill, now a gangland haunt for addicts. Here we were introduced to a young man who arrived in a haze of herbal smoke. Nassem, a Moroccan immigrant, had once poached the river in his youth until, as Jacky put it, “I could stop running after him when he became a member.” Though he spoke no English, his arms-outstretched gesture and Jacky’s translation told us the river held trout of sixty centimetres. His phone gallery of trophy fish made believers of us.

Nassem shows off a streamer-hungry perch.

Jacky and Nassem proved the most skilled anglers I’ve ever met. Their precision matched their expectations. Beneath a bridge, Jacky instructed Bryce, a relative tyro, to perform a “backhand snake roll cast with an aerial mend. Land the nymph right against the far wall. Any shorter, and you’ll snag the rubble the Germans left behind when they bombed the old bridge.” No pressure. Poor Nassem waded in repeatedly to rescue flies that fell short.

Nassem retrieving Bryce's flies.

It was beneath this bridge that my indicator dipped. I struck, and though my line was attached to something alive, it felt unlike any fish I’d known. The creature plodded downstream with deliberate weight. At last I glimpsed it—a massive, furious rat that I later learned was a coypu. I coaxed it to the bank, but no one dared approach those formidable teeth. I broke off the fly, and the rat swam free. Jacky and Nassem roared with laughter, declaring that if I ever returned, I’d be known as The Rat Man of the Risle.

It was a wonderfully surreal and unexpected day, spent in the company of two angling masters devoted to a stretch of river that bears the scars of human proximity. Yet, in those murky waters littered with detritus, the trout thrive - growing to surprising size. A reminder, perhaps, that appearances can deceive and beauty often hides in the most unlikely places.