Adventures of fly angler in Poland

My daughter asked a few times when I will take her fishing.  I usually go to mountain rivers, which require waders' boots, and some serious skills.  But there's the other type of fishing - family-oriented commercial fisheries. One of them is popular Dolina Będkowska near Kraków.  It has few ponds, stocked with various fish, a restaurant, a playground, and a store. After skating lesson with my daughter, we headed to the Dolina Będkowska.  My fault was that I took only one fishing gear set.   I thought that only I will be fishing, and my family will be watching it. How wrong I was! My wife asked me to give her a rod. There was a lot of rainbow trout in small pond. You can see in polarized glasses, how they trying to attack a lure. My wife eventually got very excited about it, and refused to give me rod back! Once they left me for 10 minutes to play with cats near restaurant. There are many cats living in this place, and my daughter loves kittie...

Dunajec river Catch-and-Release section getting more and more popular, so it's hard to get a license on the weekend. This time, only licenses for the lower C&R section were available. They are slightly cheaper (75 PLN), vs 90 PLN for the whole C&R (upper and lower).  I arrived to the river at 6 AM and parked my car in the forest near the bank. There's a section of water with rapids, boulders and deep pockets between them. It may potentially hold many fish, but it can be fished effectively with only one method - euro nymphing (or Czech/Polish nymphing).  So I started with nymphs, although my favorite method of fly fishing is streamer. These pockets are just too short, steamer calls out for wider runs or pools. Soon, as I started, I got a fish.  But the pleasure wasn't too long, it came off the hook.  No problem, the river is big, and I can catch another one. Then I moved down below, to another rapids. In most of this river part, water is too fast,...

Every year in the middle of May I go to the river Drwęca near the city Toruń to the festival "I love DH".  It's a meetup of Polish double hand fly rod enthusiasts. This year it was kind of special because it was not organized as a festival, more like meet of friends.  There were not so many people. I traveled alone from Kraków. Started at 1:30 AM and drove all night on empty roads. No police, no other cars. I didn't see other drivers in 40 minutes of driving, which is unusual.  At 4:20 I arrived to the city Łodż, where I picked up my friend, Tomek.  We planned to arrive early and spend some time on the river, before the meeting. First, we arrived to the site called "Plaża/Glinki" (The Beach/Clay). For me this name has a special meaning. 2 years ago I fell into the water from the cutbank while fishing, and dipped up to my chest. This time, river was very low, about 15-16 m3/s. It's possible to cross it to the other size below Glinki, it's ...

This trip to Dunajec was so-so in terms of fish catches. I came to the river early. Everything was perfect - a bit more water (22 m3/s), cloudy weather, and i was alone on the river despite of the holidays. But fish wasn't in bite mood. There was few takes on streamers, but not so aggressive and not reliable.  I managed to bring only one fish to the net. I put more effort into investigating new water. This particular place I found, offers some deep pockets between boulders. And there's fish for sure, I even saw one decent brown trout jumping. But it didn't bite my flies. This strimer was very successful in my previous trip, but now I had only two bites on it. Probably I would have better results on the nymph. But I'm not so fascinated with euro nymphing as I do love spey casting.  Spey casting is fun, even if you not catching fish. This was my least successful trip to Dunajec in this year.  Probably fish took holiday too.  But I know they ...