DH STEINOUR
a schwarzwald idyll
Fishing for brown trout in Germany's Black Forest
By DH Steinour
You are a better fly fisherman than me. I’m not being self-deprecating to curry favor – you are genuinely a better fly fisherman than me. I was raised on tube jigs and inline spinners and in my teenage wisdom I thought fly fishing was for tweed-clad snobs. But it was Confucius who probably said, ‘Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change’, so when I caught the fly fishing bug a year or so ago, I did not resist. Not that I dove in head first; there were still babies and work and honey-do lists, but I began stealing an hour every few weeks (or was it months?) to fiddle with a fly rod.
Well a rare time comes when Uncle Sam smiles upon you, and rather than clubbing you in the back of the head and throwing you on a C-17 bound for someplace sandy, he bestows gifts wrapped in gilded tissue paper and tied with silken bows. When I heard I was being put on orders to Germany for a couple months in early summer, I pondered the piscatorial possibilities. They were sending me to the doorstep of the Black Forest. ‘There’s trout there, right?’ I thought as I packed my four weight.
Acquiring a German Fishing License
The axiom about Germans loving rules and regulations is well-trod because it’s true. Citations abound for things like jay-walking and parking like an idiot and picking your nose past your second knuckle. So when it came to fishing I had a strong desire not to run afoul the German authorities and, downstream from them and just as capable of unpleasantness, my military chain of command. I did some homework and found fishing licenses were issued by individual German states, and with my target being Black Forest trout in the southwest of the country, I pursued a license from the state of Baden-Württemberg. Stuttgart, home of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, is the capital of Baden-Württemberg.
There I sat in a municipal building in downtown Stuttgart, praying the fat bureaucrat in Birkenstocks would look on me with favor. I gave him my rehearsed line: ‘Ich möchte ein Fischereischein, bitte,’ (I’d like a fishing license, please). It was my third time in that office. Just finding the place took half a day. Stuttgart’s tourist office referred me to a tackle shop called the Fisherman’s Partner, two train rides away. The Fisherman’s Partner sent me back downtown to the Rathaus (City Hall). ‘Fischereischein, bitte,’ I explain sweetly to the old man behind the window at City Hall. ‘Ja,’ he says, and hands me a brochure with dozens of office addresses. My desired office was in an annex several blocks away. I ran in circles until I found the annex and dashed upstairs to the office of Waffen-, Sprengstoff-, Jagd- und Fischereiangelegenheiten (Weapons-, Explosives-, Hunting- and Fishing Matters).
It was closed. Hours were posted: twice per week they were open five and a half hours, once a week they were open three hours. This made for a slightly narrower window than strolling into Walmart at midnight in your Crocs expecting to buy a deer tag.
So I returned during a proper time and found the office again closed. They were counting ballots for the European Union election. I took a deep breath and vowed to return. My third time they were open for business and I queued behind two grayed men in the hallway. A young guy joined the line and we struck up a conversation. He was there to ask a technical question about storing his .22 ammunition. He said the only rifle he owned was a .22 he shot in competition at a club. We talked about Germany’s famously stringent firearms laws and he described studying abroad in California and going to a gun range to shoot an AR-15, but he couldn’t get through his story without laughing about California’s ‘asinine’ gun laws (again, this German man was at a government office to inquire about legally storing .22 ammo).
Anyway, my turn came and I marched in and announced, ‘Ich möchte ein Fischereischein, bitte’. The bureaucrat grimaced and ran out of the room. I paused a moment and looked around, peeking out into the hallway. The bureaucrat came back huffing, hauling a millennial by the arm to translate my pidgin German. I presented a current resident fishing license from my home state of Pennsylvania, my passport, and a spare passport photograph. Several forms and €40 ($45) later they handed me a little blue card – my license.
When I heard the requirements for a normal license I was glad for the option of a tourist one. Residents must find a local fishing club and pay roughly €150 ($170) for a 30-40 hour course. The course is a bruiser – they test your casting skills and lecture you on biology, species identification, and environmental protection, culminating in a 30-question multiple choice test (and yes, everything is in German). If you ace the test they present you a certificate to take to City Hall and exchange it for a license. There are no casual anglers in Germany; this is a serious business.
And being a license holder only gets you partway there. I couldn’t just drive to the nearest river and cast a line. All waters are managed by clubs and owners, so not only do you need a state license but also a Tageskarte (day permit) for that certain stretch of river for a specified date.
With the time spent running down the state license I only had a few weekends left before returning home to the States. Through online research I compiled a list of three rivers I hoped to fish in the southern Schwarzwald: the Gutach, the Elz, and the Schlücht.
The Gutach River – Where catch and release is verboten
Next Saturday morning I drove into the popular tourist town of Titisee-Neustadt and stopped at Harry’s Bike Shop. Harry was just opening up, rolling bicycles onto the sidewalk. I asked about Tageskarten for the Gutach. Pulling out a pile of permit cards, he quickly crossed out €15 ($17) and wrote €20 ($22) at the top. These were old cards, he explained. He copied information from my license onto the two cards and took pictures of them with his phone. I gave him a look and he said he needed my information in case I did not return the record of my catch; this way he would know where to direct the Polizei. Wonderful. I went to leave and he gave a stern look over his glasses and reminded me: “Catch and Release ist in Deutschland verboten!”
You read that right – catch and release is illegal in Germany. During my time fishing there I found the vilification of the catch and release ethos to be the chief difference between Teutonic and American fishing. The logic Germans use (or at least those who support the controversial ‘mandatory kill’ policy) is roughly this: If an angler catches a fish, causing it pain and distress, only to release it back into the water like a mere plaything, then the angler is a sadist. If an angler inflicts pain on a fish by hooking and landing it, he better harvest and eat it to give the fish’s struggle some meaning.
I can follow this philosophy to a point, but the logic derails when Germans speak of Schonmaß, or minimum size. You see, mandatory harvest only applies to bigger fish. On the Gutach, trout 28 centimeters (11 inches) and larger MUST be harvested (up to two per day), but trout smaller than 28 centimeters do not. To me, this is the rub. Do not smaller fish feel pain? Is their struggle of any less value? By requiring catch and release for small fish, policymakers concede that fish are still able to be productive members of the ecosystem after being caught – why else would their release be mandated?
But these thoughts only cloud the root concern: Who steers conservation policy and fisheries management in Germany? Of the handful of Germans I spoke to about fishing regulations, they attributed the policy to animal rights activists. They said the rules governing fishing are not written with anglers in mind but rather with those who want to eradicate the sport. German anglers bemoan the lack of trophy fish in their waters – perhaps it’s because they are legally required to kill any sizable fish they catch.
To a biased (and opinionated) American, the high barrier to entry coupled with state-mandated harvest hamstrings recreational fishing in Germany. I’ll acknowledge my small sample size, but on a beautiful weekend in June I had three kilometers of the Gutach River completely to myself. I never saw another angler. Biergartens were packed and lines of tour buses rumbled by on cobblestones but no one was interested in the native brown trout but me.
As for the fishing, I drove directly from Harry’s to a grocery store that marked the end of my access on the downstream side. I parked and put on waders and boots and plunged down a slope into tall grasses and beech trees in the direction of the sound of water. The Gutach was probably 20 feet across there and clear and cool with smooth rocks of all sizes complicating the flow. I stripped line and shuffled into the middle of the stream, glad to finally start.
And start I did. Within two minutes of dunking a nymph my rod came alive with a trout surging and dancing, so strong for its size, and when I netted it I laughed with relief and excitement. The trips to City Hall and the hassle and expense of the permits were worth it; a Black Forest brown trout flopped in my net. At 26 centimeters (10 inches) it wasn’t of mandatory kill size so I released it and sat down on a rock, legs shaking.
Wading upstream was a slow trek into town and soon the trees gave way to bridges flying overhead and pedestrians stopping to watch the show. Five or six onlookers at a time gave me hazy looks like they remembered people used to do this. Of course their gazes created a magnetic attraction between my nymph and drooping willow-wands and I fought bushes more than I fished. But as the day wore on I brought several more trout to my net, small but strong, and I bumped and spooked a number of larger ones on my upstream slog.
For a mid-afternoon break I drove to the nearby lake called Titisee that glimmers amongst fir-covered hills. I celebrated the day’s success with a beer and the obligatory slice of Black Forest gateau, the cherries and chocolate drunk with Kirschwasser. It was good, but my mom’s is better.
The Elz River – 97 years after Hemingway
Another American who understood the challenges of navigating the ‘legal labyrinth’ of Badischer fishing permits did so in 1922, and his name was Ernest Hemingway. Nearly a full century ago the young author and his first wife, Hadley, spent a week writing and poaching trout from the stony banks of the Elz River. He only resorted to felony after being spun in similar bureaucratic circles as myself, finally posting Hadley as a lookout as he swung fish into his creel. Their time ended when locals stormed out of the forest brandishing pitchforks.
As I drove into the village of Oberprechtal on the Elz I admired the organization of the Black Forest. As Hemingway noted, the region is not an unbroken march of woven woodlands but rather a thousand hills capped with fir trees yielding to broad meadows of dairy cows and goats, their bells clanging endlessly on the sloping skirts. At the bottom of the fertile valleys sit squat brown chalets with geranium boxes in the windows and clear, gravelly trout streams murmuring in the low places. Property lines are demarcated by great stacks of firewood and every farm has a crucifix standing grimly by the road.
I pulled into the Oberprechtal tourist office the moment it opened and a kindly lady sold me two Tageskarten for €12 ($14) apiece. The river ran just on the other side of the village park so I geared up and walked to a little bridge that leaped over it. The stream was narrower than the Gutach and I immediately saw trout nosing slowly in the current with tails wagging. I ducked and crept behind and cast a midge-looking dry fly for a while with no takers. Knowing there were three or four fish up there I switched to a nymph and drifted it through the crowd. My line jumped and I landed a trout the size of my hand. I smiled knowing that 97 years ago Hemingway caught this trout’s ancestors from the same section of this stream.
As I continued downstream the Elz broke into stair-stepping pools of rock dams with pounding chutes below, presenting unique tactical challenges that felt a bit like the holes of a golf course. I fished down to hole five, which is a dogleg left full of beechy hazards and I lost a trout that ran into the rough. The willow and beech and maple-choked river poured out of town into farm country where men were haying on the slopes. Ancient tractors dragged hay wheels that whisked the cuttings into fluffy rows. Young men with pitchforks followed, flinging the early hay onto carts. I wondered if those pitchforks had ever been used to menace anglers.
That night I supped at Gasthaus Rössle, the inn that hosted the young writer and his wife so long ago. Despite referring to him on their website as that ‘cocky American journalist’, the inn takes full advantage of its famed visitor with commentary and photographs of Hemingway at every turn. That’s not to say they spent the last century riding celebrity coattails – I found their Jägerschnitzel succulent and their service superb.
After dinner I drove to the farmstead where I booked a bed for the night. As I drifted off I thought of Forellen, the German name for these fish. I think Forellen is nearer the mark than our clunky ‘trout’. Forellen accentuates their elegance. Neither bass nor carp are elegant, but Forellen definitely are.
The Schlücht River – Stream to table in an hour
When I turned up at the inn on the Swiss border to inquire about a Tageskarte on the Schlücht, the owner spent a while looking for permits. I wondered how long it had been since an angler swung on these fish. Eventually he found them and sold me a day’s access for €15. The fishable section ran from a farm on the downstream end through the village of Ühlingen to the town’s soccer field on the upstream side, two kilometers total.
I felt buoyant and boyish trudging past the manicured soccer pitch towards the woods and came upon a covered bridge looking fresh from a Grimm brothers' story. Encountering no trolls nor wolves I rigged up a fly and splashed into the skinny water.
The Schlücht is skinny both ways, being rarely wider than my rod and seldom deeper than my knee. Bugs buzzed as I drifted my rig through likely seams, dodging the maple canopy all around me. If you ever desire humility (first off, good for you), find a narrow stream running through a maple grove and start casting a nine-foot rod. You have no idea how uncoordinated you are until trying this. I spent the next three fishless hours untangling my line from leaf and stem. By eleven I reached the edge of town and decided to work my way back up, hot and dripping with sweat.
With that, somewhere in the cosmos a switch flipped on and Forellen smashed my rig. I caught a half dozen brown trout between 18 and 26 centimeters (7-10 inches) over the next hour in the very pools I had just waded. Something I hope we never fully understand is how you can fish for hours with no signs of life and in a blink you catch a pile of them. I like that absurd lucky feeling when it happens. But like any angler I expected the bite to dissipate in a flash and the karma pendulum to swing back the other way. I felt it going when I slipped.
I lost my footing on a big wet rock and fell with a crunch. For a second I was dazed and I wondered if the crunch was shattered vertebrae. I rolled over and pulled my landing net out from under me. Its wrist was cracked and my spinal cord wasn’t and I was grateful, but I figured the good luck had run thin. But the next pool proved otherwise because I hooked the best fish of the day there. This Forelle was 31 centimeters (12 inches) so the state mandated that I kill it so I took a rock and cracked it on the head and its color went dull. I took out my pocket knife and cut from the vent to the tongue and pulled out the entrails and big clumps of roe came out with the guts. I cringed because the state made me kill this big hen that was ready to spawn and I washed her in the stream and put her in my rucksack.
There was the sweet, warm smell of cows cropping the nearby field when I checked my watch and it was just after noon so I hiked to the car and drove to the Gasthaus from the night before. I handed the Frau the trout and she smiled and threw it in her frying pan with butter. I don’t have to tell you it was one of the best lunches I ever had.
