French kissing – their ways with a dry fly

During a recent trip to France, Charles Jardine was taught a new way to French kiss. It involves short-casting and having as little line on the water as possible.

Here the river was different. It was lighter in spirit. Happier. Less forboding. Gone were the vast boulders, heavy, damp moss and lichens and deep, almost glacial-like, pools. Water burst around small rocks like children laughing across a playground. Suddenly, it felt as though I might catch something. I then suggested that Serge showed me how he would approach water like this. He immediately put on a size 12 red spinner-type pattern with Coq-de-leon tails, rust coloured CdC dubbed body and a large, almost spider-like, natural red, sparse hackle – on a size 12. (I had been faffing about with 16’s 18’s and so on). Next, he wound in most of my fly line and extended my leader to about 14ft, slid into the river and began casting deftly close to and around rocks and into the really fast broken water between. The longest cast being, probably, two-rod lengths at best. I had been curving my line – positive, negative parachuting the thing and doing every trick in the book that I knew. All of it too far!

All Serge said was: “Ici?”

Oh yes. I was rapidly getting the picture. It was sort of dances with trout flies. Clearly, the idea was to kiss the water with the fly and have as little line on the water as possible to avoid drag and spook what were obviously very, very wary trout.

After a while, not only did I get the rudimentary hang of all this, but found it utterly compelling. The absorption level was total, that when a trout did rise it was … shocking, actually.

The whole business was so fast, near brutal. What fish, though! Feisty little alpine – almost zebra-like – brown trout as wild as the landscape; they bounced across the surface, drove for rocks and did everything that a wolverine like fish should. Fantastic. I managed a couple more but the real consummation of the lesson was to come with Stephane Faudon.

Stephane is a new breed of guide; as passionate about the places and the creatures in those places as the fishing itself. Serge is the old school – fantastic with clients, committed, charming and with a thorough knowledge of his area, but slightly more of the traditionalist: the Corot, to Stephane’s Van Goth or Raoul Duffy. But as a fisher, Stephane is breathtaking.

As we met and were going through the usual palaver of tackle selection, Stephane pounced and began his preferred choice. Serge was comfortable with what the client was happy with: Stephane was there to impress his ideas and will on the fisher and get them tooled up for the job he had in mind. His selection was adamant and unequivocal. His eyes lit up when he saw the 10 #4 and he positively purred when he noticed that I had a Phoenix (made by ex-pat Mike Brooks) DT 4 silk line. Stephane then wasted no time at all, in unleashing a 15ft leader adding a further 18 or so inches of tippet more of 6X. All this was something very different.

I, almost hesitantly, asked what fly to put on. There was the Gallic shrug again: “It doze not mattuuer much; somthink big and bushey – somthink zat they can zee.” So to the tippet was added a bushy deer hairy sort of a fly thing – a really nondescript, sedgy design. Again, fly patterns seem to be the least consideration over how they were fished. As long as they repelled water a bit, had a good buggy profile, were reminiscent of a caddis or similar they pretty much did the job. Lots of Coq-de-Leon, soft dubbing, deer hair and spiky hackles and CdC seemed the order of the day. Apparently there are instances that call for fly accuracy but the important thing is getting the fly to the fish before scaring it: it was ever thus!

All the details and diagrams of this French style of longleader/short cast dry fly style appears in the April issue.