The 43rd FIPS Mouche World Fly Fishing Championship
Hello everyone,
This post is the first in a series that I will be doing documenting my experience at the 43rd FIPS Mouche World Fly Fishing Championships this year. The championships were held in Font-Romeu, France. Font-Romeu is a small ski town in the eastern Pyrenees near the Spanish border. It was a beautiful place to spend a couple of weeks. While the fishing was challenging and mainly for small fish, it was also rewarding. However, if I were to go back it would probably be with my road bike as I was wishing for it while watching all the other cyclists around climbing and descending the winding mountain roads.
The championship venues consisted of the Tet River, Aude River, Vicdessos River, and then multiple high mountain lakes within the Carlit Lakes and Camporells Lakes. The target fish species included the mediterranean strain of brown trout in all the venues. This strain of brown trout is known for its zebra-like vertical bands that become very distinctive on larger fish. Other fish included European grayling in the Aude River, and rainbow trout in the high mountain lakes as well as a few in the Aude River.
The fishing in the area is known for its challenging nature. The mediterranean brown trout have a reputation for being especially suspicious and difficult to catch, especially after they’ve received fishing pressure. The rivers have a history of intense catch and keep angling pressure with high bag limits which make the remaining fish even more wary. Adding to the challenge, the organizers had provided almost no practice water. They used up the bulk of the available water for the incredibly long venues which forced us to fish other rivers and lakes or non-representative stretches of the competition rivers. What little practice water was available became heavily fished by various teams very quickly and it became difficult to catch any fish and gain confidence in specific fly patterns. Many teams turned to fishing in nearby Spain and Andorra to try and get less pressured fish that would hopefully provide ideas for how to fish the competition venues, even if all the specifics didn’t translate.
The opening ceremonies parade in Font Romeu
We had a young USA team consisting of Michael Bradley, Mike Komara, Jack Arnot, Cody Burgdorff, and me (the old fart). Our reserve angler was Nick Ryzka-Filipek and our captain was Glade Gunther. We had some great help from our guides Maxime Zzaoui, Said Yahiaoui, Christophe Idre, and Yannick Riviere. We also had some much-appreciated help for food during the championship from the self-proclaimed MAGs (moms and girlfriends) including Katie Mazzia, Courtney Van der Linden, Katie Smith, and Jane Weigand.
Our team along with our guide Christophe Idre at the Carlit Lakes during practice.
Our practice went similar to most of the other teams. We struggled to catch fish on the few available stretches of the Aude River. The nearby Carol River was our best river on our first visit but was incredibly tough on our second visit after other teams had fished it heavily. We also fished some stretches of the O’riege and Auriege Rivers but they were similarly difficult to unhelpful. We made three hikes to check out the Carlit Lakes and then to fish the nearby Reco and Esparbe lakes in hopes they would fish similarly. Each of these days clocked up 8-12 miles and added to the physicality of the practice. Our visits to these lakes helped inform strategies for the lakes more so for me than our river sessions did. I especially enjoyed the time spent at the high lakes. These lakes were similar but yet different to the high lakes I frequent in the summer at home. In addition to providing interesting fishing, they were simply stunning locations to spend time.
A bridge over the O'riege River during practice.
Despite the challenging fishing, we had an enjoyable practice together as a newly formed team. Mike Komara and Nick Ryzka-Filipek were new additions after Lance Egan and Pat Weiss decided to retire from world championships competition after last year’s championship in Slovakia. We all knew the quality of our anglers though and I felt confident going into the championships that we had a good shot at a medal together.
When we saw the group drawings after the captain’s meeting, I knew I had a very difficult road ahead individually. In addition to solid anglers from many of the countries, our group (group C) included three world champions including Pierre Kuntz (France), David Arcay (Spain), and Tomas Starychfojtu (Czech Republic). There were also two other individual medalists Jyrki Hiltunen (Finland) and me as well as last year’s 4th place finisher Tom Jarman (Australia) and the talented Ollie Bassett (New Zealand). Each group at a world championship always has lots of excellent anglers but I knew I would have to fish exceptionally well to have a chance to do much individually with the extra stacked field in my group. Mainly I was hoping to just hold my own so that I hopefully could contribute to a team medal.
Before I get going with my session reviews, let me quickly explain some unique differences for how this championship was run compared to most. On the rivers, we fished a two-hour session in the morning on one beat. We then drove with our controller to a predetermined beat on another section of the river to fish another two-hour afternoon session. The idea of the organizers was to try and pair one bad beat with one good beat, or two mid-grade beats, in order to try and even out the production capacity of the beats. This is a good idea in theory if there is enough previous data to inform the pairings and I applaud the organizers for trying to provide beats that were as fair as they could. The main issue with the execution was that many beats were massively long (600 meters or more), and it was nearly impossible to properly scout them, especially when there was a tighter time window in the afternoon. This became a big advantage for the French team since they had lots of previous experience on these rivers to know where the best locations within each beat were.
The lakes had an even stranger setup. Seven lakes in each of the high mountain lake chains were used for each lake venue. Based on the initial beat drawn, there was a predetermined rotation to three more beats, each on different lakes. Each beat was fished for one hour with an hour in between to hike to the next lake/beat and prepare to fish. This meant that anglers were fishing different lakes at different times. Some of the lakes were quite distant from each other in terms of distance on the ground and elevation. There were also some lakes that individual anglers would fish and others that individual anglers would not fish. This setup runs pretty contrary to the traditional setup of fishing the same body of water at the same time. Whether it was more or less “fair” than the standard protocol could be debated at length. What became clear though during the championships was that there were definitely better lakes than others and there were better times to be at certain lakes given upticks in fish activity at different times of the day.
A photo of the beat map and walking paths for the Camporells Lakes venue.
Session 1:
The draw found my group going to the Tet River in the first session. Given the information we had prior to the championship, this river was likely to produce the best numbers of trout. The rotation on this river took us to a lower beat in the morning followed by a beat upriver during the afternoon. The river was considerably higher in volume in the downstream beats compared to the upstream beats.
My morning beat started with some flatter pocket water near the bottom. Then there was a short flat broken by a few rocks. Trees overhung quite a bit of this lower section. Above the flat there was slow run with a tree over the top of it followed by about 60 yards of shallow pocket water that was open and sunny. There was then a large slow pool with an overhung tree and a nice run entering the top. The last 125-150 meters was a narrow and faster series of pockets and runs with a mix of bedrock and boulders. The total length of the beat was probably around 400 meters or so. I knew there was no way I could fish it all thoroughly during a two-hour session.
Some of the pockets near the top of my beat.
We had no practice information on the Tet River. As a result, I expected to have to try and feel out the density of fish and where they tended to hold in the first hour of the session. My hope was that I could try and dial in some fly patterns that were more successful than others and find which types of water I needed to focus on the most in the latter half of the morning session. The only nugget of information I had to go on was that our guide Christophe suggested the fish would be in the faster water and we should skip the flat water. What that actually meant though was hard to understand through translation. Looking back, if I had known at the beginning of the session what I figured out after the first hour and a half, it would have been a much different session.
I set up three rods for the session. I had a dedicated dry fly rod as well as two nymph rods with micro leaders. I chose the Hardy Ultralite LL 9’ 9” 4 weight for my dry fly rod. I had a hard time deciding which of my nymph rods I wanted to fish for the tournament after testing various rods during practice. I ended up settling on a Thomas and Thomas Contact II 10’ 9” 3 weight and an Adams XTZ 10’ 6” 2 weight.
Initially, I set up the Adams with a single nymph for the tighter pockets and I rigged the T and T with a two fly setup that I could switch between a nymph or a dry on the dropper tag.
I started at the bottom of the beat with the plan to fish through the initial pockets by swapping between the single fly and two fly rig depending on the characteristics of each target lie. Looking at my scoresheet, it took 10 minutes to land my first brown trout on a pheasant tail. I was also using Doppelganger Pheasant Tails interchangeably throughout the championship so it could have been either pattern. I then kept searching likely holding spots but couldn’t find any more willing takers. I fished dry flies and dry droppers deep under overhanging trees where I thought there would be cagey brown trout to no avail.
Fifteen minutes after the first fish, I had my second brown trout which took a cinnamon perdigon under a dry in one of the deeper pockets within the flat. At this point I was starting to sweat it a little bit. I had covered a lot of water that I would have expected fish in on brown trout rivers at home. I tried to pick up the pace a little bit and focus mainly on the best-looking lies which I would consider “A” water while skipping the “B” and “C” water. I caught one more fish in my 40th minute of the session but this only gave me three at this point.
The flat where I caught my second fish. The fish was landed in a pocket near the head of it hidden by the branch in the left side of this photo.
I continued to search hard through the lower section of my beat. Looking back, this was the biggest mistake I made during the session. I covered the water quickly compared to my normal pace but I spent a full forty one minutes more before I landed my next fish with one fish that I hooked and lost in between. When that next fish came, I had moved upstream to the deep slow run with the tree overhanging the bottom of it. I expected fish under the tree but did not find any. However, as I fished the dry dropper in the slower deep water above the tree, I finally found another fish. I then continued to cover the run to the top with the dry dropper before switching and going back through with two nymphs to get a little deeper. I found one more fish in this run to bring me up to five in the session.
At this point I had a half hour left in my morning two-hour session. I quickly hit a couple of the best looking pockets in the open pocket water. These did not produce fish and I realized I had let another five important minutes pass. I would have expected this water to be productive on a river at home but it was evidently unproductive water on the Tet River in France.
The open pockets in the middle of my beat.
With about 25 minutes left, I ran to the pool above. I quickly shortened my leader to keep it legal and rerigged to make a dry dropper rig with four feet of tippet below the dry for the center of the pool. I skipped the nearly stagnant tail end of the pool where I saw lots of coarse fish and snuck my way along the bank to where I could hide behind bushes on the bank. I made casts down the gut of the deepest flowing water in the center of the pool and tried to manage my drift the best I could from my downstream position. A few casts in my dry went down and I was tight to my 6th fish.
The lower half of the slow pool in my beat. I caught a fish while kneeling near the small bushes in the left side of the photo.
I spent the next 15 minutes working toward the top of the pool. A fish rose under the overhanging tree along the way. I still don’t know if it was a trout or coarse fish. Either way it ignored both my single dry and dry dropper presentations. With only five minutes left I shortened my dropper tippet down to 2.5’ and began fishing the run coming into the pool. I ended up landing three fish in nearly consecutive casts in the last three minutes. The last one I hooked with 15 seconds left in the session. Each of these fish took a claret perdigon which Cody had been fishing on the rivers during practice.
The top of the book in my morning beat. I caught three fish in the main current on the left. I sure wish I had saved more time for this water and the water above.
At the end of the first morning session I had nine brown trout on the scoresheet. I was also kicking myself. Six of these fish had come grouped together from water three feet or deeper that was not very fast. I was beginning to understand the water types where fish held in the Tet but only after spending a lot of time sorting through water that was not holding fish. It became clear that all that pocket water I had spent time in at the bottom of the beat had been a waste of time. The worst part was that the remainder of my beat that I had left unfished appeared to have a lot of the type of water where I would expect there to be more podded trout. I was not sure what the upper river would hold in comparison, but I kept this in mind going into the afternoon.
My afternoon beat ended up being a bit of a weird piece of water. All of the rivers in the championship have been heavily modified by repeated hydroelectric dams. My beat in the afternoon was a good example. The lowest 30 meters had some flatter water that was overhung with trees. Above that there was a diversion canal that removed water from the river to be used for power generation at a powerhouse downstream. There were two man made “buckets” formed at this diversion from rocks that had been cemented for the water exiting diversion. Upstream, there was also a long deep featureless run formed by the cement wall that formed the main diversion. At the top of the run the water got more interesting with some rocks and overhanging trees that created likely holding water.
The diversion canal coming out of my beat.
For 50-60 meters above this diversion the water had at least twice the volume. There were some nice pockets here and I expected the fish to be more willing to eat due to the extra cover of the higher water. This expectation became ironically comical later. At the top of this high flow stretch, there was a powerhouse where the extra flow was coming in through a pipe that had been diverted from somewhere upstream.
Above this powerhouse there was a mix of higher gradient pocket water and two flat pools. During my scouting time I spotted a couple of fish in the pools and marked them for later.
I started my afternoon session at the bottom of the beat again. I began with the dry dropper in the flatter water at the bottom. The lack of depth and flow though was uninspiring, and I quickly moved past this stretch after a few minutes. I moved up to the two “buckets” below the diversion.
The flat run near the bottom of my beat. I did not catch fish here.
I began working the hard seam in the lower bucket with a single nymph. I caught my first afternoon session brown trout a couple of casts in on a pheasant tail with a white bead. I could not get any other fish from this spot and moved on to the larger “bucket” upstream. There was a ton of turbulence in this spot and my drifts showed that the water near the bottom was often going a different direction than the water near the surface. It took a few changes but I was able to catch two fish by working progressively deeper into the bucket. The first took a Gasolina Perdigon. On a whim I tied on a cream mop and worked it deep with animation. This tactic brought my first and last trout during the championship on a mop despite several attempts later on.
The two man made "buckets" below the diversion in my beat. I caught one fish from the bottom bucket and two from the upper bucket.
By this point I was already a half hour into my afternoon session with three trout on the board and 12 for the combined sessions. I knew I had to pick up the pace a bit while continuing to focus on the deeper holding water that I expected fish to be in based on my morning session.
The next spot I fished was the top of the diversion channel. It was an awkward spot to fish because of the cement wall. I needed to find a way to drift where I wanted without spooking fish. I started fishing while standing below the wall similar to how I tend to fish below beaver dams. I began with a dry dropper expecting a fish or two to be suspended and willing to eat under the overhanging branches. No fish showed themselves, so I switched the dry out for a nymph and began working progressively deeper. Over the next 15 minutes I caught three successive fish from the deeper slot at the top of this spot. I got my first with a “standard” drift, my second by animating the flies during the drift, and my third took as my flies started to swing near the end of a drift.
The run as it entered into the diversion structure. I caught three fish where the shady area transitioned to sun.
After this well ran dry, I moved on to some nice deeper pockets above the run below. However, what was initially deep heavy water, quickly became shallow pockets. It took me a minute to realize that they had just turned the water off at the power station above me. Once I realized this, I moved to the only remaining somewhat deep water in the previously high flow section. I caught one fish on a nymph below a dry on the slow side of a seam coming into a run. Before the session, I expected this to be the best water in my beat.
The high flow stretch of river that became a low flow stretch just after I started fishing it.
With 45 minutes remaining, I quickly moved to the first deeper broken run above the powerhouse and started fishing. I fished here for about five minutes working various drifts and making a couple of rig and fly swaps. Just before I was about to move on, I glanced back downstream. They had turned the water at the power station back on!!
At this point it was too late to head back to the high flow stretch though and I kept moving upstream. There were several more attractive deep pockets that I thought were likely to hold fish. I worked what I thought were good drifts with multiple rigs through them with no willing takers. I kept checking my watch and reminded myself that I still had two pools to fish before the beat ended.
One of the locations I was expecting to catch fish in the beat but was sadly mistaken.
I ran up to the next pool. The sun was on most of the pool now while it had been shady on half of it during my scouting time. I took 30 seconds to look for fish where I had previously spotted them. Sadly, none of the fish I had seen previously were visible any longer. I don’t know if I had somehow spooked them while moving up into the pool or if the high sun had forced them to retreat. Either way, I made a few casts with the dry dropper rig into the deepest slow pockets of the back half of the pool. No fish materialized.
I knew the most likely place for happily feeding fish was the slightly faster head of the pool. There was a nice center current that flowed over a submerged boulder. I began firing some long casts from downstream into the water just upstream of the boulder. A few casts in, my dry went down just before coming over the boulder and I had another brown. It must have been riding the cushion just in front of the boulder. This fish hit my net with 18 minutes left in the session.
The lower pool in my beat. I caught one fish just upstream of the rock protruding from the water.
I continued fishing the run coming into this pool but could not find any more willing fish. With 12 minutes left I sprinted to the pool at the top of my beat under the bridge. The sun had shifted here as well and put most of the pool under the shadow from the bridge. When I scouted here I saw a brown trout suspended in the back half of the pool but I could not see into the water any longer with the shift in the sun. Hoping this fish, or another was still in the area, I worked some dry dropper drifts quickly up through the pool until reaching the bridge. The dry dropper drifts produced nothing.
I was pretty sure that the pool was quite deep and I knew it was time for a change. I would have liked to have switched to a longer tippet below the dry to work through with a suspended rig a bit deeper through the pool. I did not have enough time though so I simply switched the dry fly out for a nymph and worked a two nymph rig deeper through the pool.
The bridge pool at the top of my beat.
The water was slow here and good dead drifts were challenging to achieve with the straight nymph rig. After a couple of standard drifts with no success, I animated my nymphs with a couple of twitches on the next drift. Just after one of these animations another brown trout took and I was on the board with my 18th fish with a few minutes left in the session.
I made a few more drifts with no takers. I switched from a 2.8 mm bead to a 3.3 mm bead on the point to try to get a bit deeper. I did get deeper but apparently too deep and I hooked bottom and broke off my rig. With only 2 minutes left in the session I grabbed my single nymph rod and made some desperate drifts near the head of the pool. Unfortunately, I ended the session on the 18th fish I’d just caught.
I was not sure what to expect with this score. I talked to Roman Teluch from Slovakia who was on the beat above me and he had 10 fish. After returning to the bus and hearing everyone else’s scores, I had gotten 7th place. I always hope for a top 5 in world championships sessions so I was a bit disappointed. I had converted almost all of the strikes I had detected into a hookup and a score. I had also made relatively few mistakes with casts, tangles, and the other typical freak issues that can happen during a session. However, my main mistake was fishing too much of the “B” and “C” water that I would normally expect fish to be holding in but I could not find fish in that type of water during this session. I kick myself for not starting near the middle of the beat during my morning session. This way I would have been able to fish the deeper fast water near the top of that beat that I am confident would have had a good number of fish.
My beat combination ended up scoring 9, 2, 22, and 8 fish in the remaining sessions. Given that Luigi from Italy scored 22 in the fourth session, I obviously missed some opportunities in the first session due to my mistakes in beat coverage.
I was also surprised at the lack of dry fly opportunities during the session. In practice, a good proportion of our fish had come to dry flies in difficult water along the banks. I tried fishing dries and dry droppers quite a bit on the Tet but I never saw a confirmed trout rise to a natural or to one of my artificials.
The good news was I felt I had solid information to pass onto my teammates as to what to focus on in their sessions. I had a good set of nymphs that caught fish. The Tet ended up being our best venue in the remaining sessions with our finishes being 7th place for Mike Komara, 2nd place for Michael Bradley, 1st place for Jack Arnot, and 4th place for Cody Burgdorff.
Our team had started off the championship with a good effort as well. After the first session, we had 32 placing points to put us in fourth place behind Spain (27 points), Ireland (22 points), and France (19 points).
