When I agreed to join a party to go and fish in Slovenia I imagined that this little hilly country-part of the old Yugoslavia-would be lost in time with dirt roads, shacks, donkeys etc. I also expected it to be miles away and anticipated a long, bumpy ride to the hotel Hvala in a village called Kobarid.
Not so. The hotel was an hour or so on decent roads from Venice -we had a queue or two on the autostrade! Kobarid is about 15 miles from the Italian border and Slovenia looked like an extension of Austria-probably since it was under Hapsburg rule for 500 years. The houses were neat and newly painted and the woodpiles perfectly assembled. The country is very mountainous and extremely beautiful.
The River Soca flows past Kobarid down to the Adriatic near Trieste . It is indeed a lovely river-crystal clear with a turquoise tinge from the chalk and limestone it flows over. It tumbles over rapids and then flows into deep pools. No weeds to worry about. It holds brown and rainbow trout, plus grayling and it’s the only Slovenian river to hold the indigenous marbled trout which have no or few spots but a marbling effect .The grayling were rising to small sedges and readily took small dry flies. The flies for the rainbows and marbled trout-which grow huge when they turn ferox-there was a 50 pounder in a case in the hotel-were much bigger and we were recommended to use a wet fly with a black streamer-very much like the leech flies used for rainbows in Alaska. I had a 3 pound rainbow in fast water on one of these and yes I did get a one pound marbled trout on the same leech fly. There were reports of a huge 50 pounder living under some logs in a very deep pool that had been excavated for gravel but no luck there. Evidently the locals have been trying to catch it for 3 years.
A very enjoyable expedition to a very beautiful river –I intend to adventure further into what was Yugoslavia. I was very pleased to learn that the marbled trout are being reared in stew ponds to keep the numbers up since it would be cruel to loose this beautiful fish from its last remaining stronghold-the delightful Soca.
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