Fly Fishing Slovenia | Day 2 

Awesome man! You are gonna have a great time. If you're looking for a guide Ziga was incredible!

Consider me jealous! If I had family in Slovenia I would visit twice a year! haha

Hvala puno Batko

Glad you enjoyed it!

Glad you enjoyed it

Absolutely! Definitely a technique that I want to continue improving on! Our guide was really talented at it.

Thanks Marco! Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for watching!

Thanks! I noticed you've been watching as bunch of the videos so thanks for the support! If you get the chance, I would encourage you to visit Slovenia! it was incredible. You can do it for a pretty reasonable price as well. The most expensive part is the plane tickets

Hey there! most of the rivers we fished were pretty deep and fast so you definitely want flies that can get down quickly. We mostly fished scud patterns and czech style hares ear variants. Most of the scud flies were size #12-#16 hooks and most of the hares ear variants were larger, size #10-#14 hooks. I would go about as heavy as possible.

Hi, thank you very much for your helpful response! @@isaacness

Thank you!

Thanks! The guide service we went with was "Fishing Guides Slovenia" and our guide was Žiga. Here's the link to their site fishing-guides-slovenia.com/ We were there in May and we looked around at a few of the other guide services before choosing ours. they just seemed very knowledgeable and professional which is why we ultimately chose them. Nothing wrong with any of the other guides we looked at, I'm sure they are great as well.

@@isaacness Thanks. I'll check them out. One further question, I saw you had a car. What city is this guide service close to? I would like to stick to trains/buses. Is a car necessary?

Thanks 👍

Glad you liked it!

Glad you liked it Allen! we went out with a company called Fishing Guides Slovenia, our guide was named Žiga and he was great. Here's the link to their site fishing-guides-slovenia.com/ We fished here in the beginning of May but the weather was unusually warm for this time of year. the conditions we had are probably closer to normal weather in early June. I would highly recommend this trip for anyone who likes to fish

@@isaacness Thanks so much for the info and the timely response!!

Absolutely! glad I could help. Let me know if you end up going. I'd be happy to share more info about what we did, where we stayed, etc.

They're a fun species to target

Thanks! the rods we were using here were a Sage response 590-4, a Sage pulse 790-4, and our guide let us use his Sage ESN 3106-4. I'm not sponsored by any companies, nor do I have a serious preference for any rod brand in particular. I have a lot of Sage rods because I used to guide and my shop had the Farbanks pro deal so they were a good price.

Hey Tom, thanks for the kind words and for the subscription! You will not regret going to Slovenia, it was our favorite place we have been. In terms of rods, 5 weights will be perfect. Just as a heads up, lots of guides prefer to french/czech nymph since many of the rivers only allow single fly, no split shot, and no suspension indicators so if you are familiar with that style of fishing and have a European nymphing rod you may want to bring that along as well! Let me know if you start planning your trip, I would be happy to send more information about our guides, lodging, favorite restaurants, etc!

All of the regulations vary from river to river and even sometimes from one stretch of a river to another. to be honest with you I'm really not sure if conventional gear is allowed or not on the rivers we fished. We only used fly rods and only saw other anglers using fly rods so I would assume it is fly only. the fishing licenses ranged from 40-100 Euros per person per day which got you access to a specific fishing clubs stretch of river.

@@isaacness Thanks for sharing!

This is the Idrijca!

Interesting perspective! Most of the fish we caught seemed very healthy and we found plenty of quality marble trout in the Soča. That's just my experience from two days of fishing there so I'm sure I have a limited view on the matter.

@@isaacness 30 years ago the marble had almost disappeared from the Soca. The population was made of grayling, rainbow and brown, brown/marble cross. brown was introduced in the 1930s or 1940s and eventually replaced the original marble. With also the crossing that was possible between the two species. But not possible with rainbows In 20 years, by dint of releasing fish from fish farms, the leaders have succeeded in reversing the process. This is to say the production power of their fish farms. Slovenia has been a forerunner in the artificial reproduction of grayling since the 1950s. Their fish farms are models of "performance" both in terms of the quality of the fish produced, so that it is very difficult to make a difference with the wild when you do not " the eye" or habit. I fished Slovenia 30 years ago, and a friend fished it 40 years ago. There have always been a lot of fish from fish farms, but the 2000s were catastrophic, like 2003 (big drought) when fish were released into the holes to keep fishermen on the banks of the rivers. Native fish now only exist in small rivers, such as the Radovna, the Sora etc... Believe my experience, some of your rainbows caught in Idrija are not natural! But any introduction of fish should be completely stopped. We would probably see less big fish, and therefore attractive for the "tourist" (I hate this term for the fisherman) because these big rainbows, even a river like the Idrijca cannot produce a lot, or very exceptionally. Today there is in all the holes... once a French fishing magazine write that Slovenia was a paradise lost; I believe that's the truth. Even if efforts are made for cel to come back in order, pure wild fish hardly exist any more in the famous rivers. sorry for breaking your dream. It remains a wonderful country, with wonderful people.

Thanks for sharing all the knowledge and history! you obviously have a lot of expertise on the fisheries of Slovenia. It would have been really cool to have experienced them prior to the commercialization you are referencing.

@@isaacness fishing in slovenia, even when it was part of yugoslavia, fishing was always expensive. It has long been a source of money for the country. Just compare the price of a day of fishing on the Soca or the Unec in relation to the basic Slovenian salary. I think there are fishermen who ask to have these big fish, without worrying about the origin; wild or not... when they should be the first to ask to preserve the native fishs from the introduction of fishs from fish farms which, whatever their quality, can never have the character of a fish born in the river. The "breeds" of trout have been built for millennia by adapting to their natural environment and their specificities which are unique to each river. all this is destroyed by the implantation of fish from fish farming and released into the river even small ! Fisheries managers should focus mainly on the preservation of natural and wild fish and especially stop putting fish from fish farms.

This was the Idrija River!

@@isaacness thanks