On the 2nd of October I flew to Slovenia – this time alone, but I also invited my parents to meet up, combining fishing with family time. I booked a nice apartment in a small house in the village of Volarje, near the geographic centrum of the Tolmin Fishing Club‘s waters. It was still a two hour drive from the airport in the dark, but I managed to avoid both the deer and the fox that decided to cross the road at some point. It was ridiculously late by the time I managed to get to bed and fall asleep… (Delayed flight, catching up with my parents, dinner, assembling all the fishing gear for the next day, being way too excited and laying wide awake in bed, just the usual stuff.)

On the first day I decided to go and fish a long, relatively difficult to access, but – based on my research – promising section of the Bača (a tributary of the Idrijca). Having only slept three and a half hours might have contributed to spooking quite some fish in the beginning (even though the most beautiful spots came early), but as I found my rhythm, I also found the fish! I explored around 6 km of the river between Klavže and Koritnica and caught 10 fish (including 2 pure marble trout, with the rest being brown trout and marble hybrids), with the largest being around 45 cm. In the middle of this river section I had to climb out of the valley to bypass a narrow and steep gorge across the forest (and a railway bridge), which was definitely more hiking than fishing, and I would not recommend it to people who are not in shape. In the afternoon the river got hazy, but this might have actually helped to avoid spooking fish. My parents (who spent the day sightseeing in the region) came to pick me up at the end of the day saving me from a 1.5 hour walk back to my rental car (in the dark – although I was prepared and had a headlight with me). While I also had a Euro nymphing rod with me (in a rod tube on my backpack), at the end I did not use that at all (except for wasting half an hour at the start while I debated myself what equipment to use – sometimes having too much of a choice can be a blocker), and I caught everything using a nymph under a yarn indicator on my standard 9′ #5 Rivermaniac rod. For lunch I had sandwiches prepared by my father (with Pick salami from Hungary), and for dinner my mother cooked something nice. I swear I did not invite them for the food and the taxi service, but it was a nice extra :D