the Alps

[kochanut]

fished in Austria all week, click below if you want to see:

http://redneckflyfishing.blogspot.com/
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[flygoddess]

Breath taking Bro. VERY Jealous!
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[mojorizing]

Looks like much better than the middle east!
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[remo_5_0]

That is awesome!!! Scenery is sick! Thanks for sharing []
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[Tarponjim]

Cool shots. Looks like a wonderful place to explore.
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[grndfisher]

I lived in Germany a total of eight years. I always enjoyed visiting Austria. I'd say it's my favorite European country. Didn't get a chance to fish it though. Nice that you did! Thanks for sharing.
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[SBW]

Wow!!! Looks absolutely amazing!! Thanks for sharing.
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[wormandbobber]

Those brook trout look a lot like splake….long, slender, lack of blue halos, small fork in tail. I wonder what strain they are…

Also, if you don't sharing, how difficult was it to get licenses/permission to fish? What about the expense?
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[kochanut]

We thought the same tng about the Brooke's. The Austrians call them char.

The license.... In Germany you need to take a 36 hour class and than a test. You basically get educated in aquatic biology and some entomology. You have to be able to identify diseases and strains of fish, disease being the big one. You have to know the name, and cause of the disease. After your 36 hour class you have a practical test you must take. You have like an hour to catch and kill a fish with a fly rod. The practical takes all of 10 minutes to do if you have ever fly fished at least once in your life. You can do it with spinning gear, but it's sort of looked down on. The class price is subsidized on base and costs us 40 Euro, or about 60 bucks. Once you pass the written and practical test the game warden gives you a card to take down to the German Rathaus, or government building. That card along with a passport photo and 50 Euro, or 75 bucks is needed for a 5 year license, I'll take and post a picture of my license tonig after work. Once you have your massively sized license, you can now buy day cards if the season is open. The price of a day card varies depending on where you want to fish. Remember there is no such thing as public land in Europe, someone owns the river and all of the fish in the river as well.

We usually pay around 10 bucks a day to fish our "home" river, and have found access to a few more sections, one costing as much as 40 bucks a day to fish, and I also found one that costs about 125 bucks a day to fish.

Where we went in Austria, the hotel has access to 90 or so miles of river and creeks and multiple lakes. They carge roughly 40 bucks a day to fish if you stay at the hotel, and some where around 90 bucks a day to fish if you just come for the day.

All in all getting the
Incense was not difficult by any means, but it was not easy. I had to take a day off of work to go to the government building to actually get it, and getting it took about 3 hours in order for the German folks to verify all of my info and such
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[riverdog]

"in Europe, someone owns the river"
Sounds like Utah. Oh wait that's criminal behavior here even if they get away with it.
Are those char native? I thought there were only native brown trout that part of Europe but fish get moved to every corner of the earth by man for sport.
Come on are you sure those pictures aren't by Morgan, Utah[].
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[doggonefishin]

Awesome report! Thanks for sharing.

[quote kochanut]We thought the same tng about the Brooke's. The Austrians call them char.
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I don't think you were catching brookies and the Austrians were correctly calling them char. I think they were indeed Arctic char. From Behnke's "Trout and Salmon of North America" pg.309,

"In Europe, the Southernmost natural distribution of the Arctic char occurs in Alpine lakes in drainages tributary to the Rhine, Rhone, and Danube rivers."

The Danube goes through Austria.
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[kochanut]

We were on the opposite side of that drainage, everything we were fishing was draining into the Adriatic Sea not the North Sea
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[doggonefishin]

[quote kochanut]We were on the opposite side of that drainage, everything we were fishing was draining into the Adriatic Sea not the North Sea[/quote]


The Danube actually empties into the Black Sea, but no matter. It would not be unreasonable to have a fish native to the region used in management of Alpine lakes in other nearby drainages as well. Additionally, your pics look very much more like Arctic char than American brookies, so I would maintain it is a strong possibility this was the case.

Again, no matter really. I'm just happy you had a great trip and shared your experience with us. I really enjoyed it.
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[riverdog]

So did you eat any of those char? I think the anadromous ones are very good and similar to salmon. The first purely fresh water one I ever ate tasted real good. Tmas was guiding us a couple days later up on the Kenai Peninsula and doubted our taste preference. We tried another char a couple days later. He was right, just fair trout like flavor. We realized the first char had been cooked on the grill right after several seasoned ribeyes[laugh] and we were mislead about it's flavor.
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[kochanut]

[quote doggonefishin][quote kochanut]We were on the opposite side of that drainage, everything we were fishing was draining into the Adriatic Sea not the North Sea[/quote]


The Danube actually empties into the Black Sea, but no matter. It would not be unreasonable to have a fish native to the region used in management of Alpine lakes in other nearby drainages as well. Additionally, your pics look very much more like Arctic char than American brookies, so I would maintain it is a strong possibility this was the case.

Again, no matter really. I'm just happy you had a great trip and shared your experience with us. I really enjoyed it.[/quote]

so now you have my interest peaked. in order to figure this out I guess I am going to have to bite the bullet and take about a week off of work and head back up there to fish again... darn the luck
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[TyeDyeTwins]

Top notch Koch!![cool]
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