Towards My Blog (1)

I found my passion for fish and fishing long ago. It’s been well over half a century now. Seventeen years ago, as it happened, I also became the president of the Angler’s Association of Tolmin. That was when fish also became my job. I had to learn about many things that I had never thought about before. Our association has over 400 members and thousands of tourist fly-fishermen who visit from all over the world to try their luck on our rivers.

Our crystal Soča. Photo by MihaV (http://flickr.com/photos/34454085@N00/14417374130) cc-by-2.0

Our rivers and our fish are not ordinary. The crystal clear Soča (pronounced Só-cha) with its exceptional colour is — well, there’s no other way to put it — an exceptional river! Almost everyone who comes to visit keeps asking, how can a river have such a wonderful colour?!

The marble trout (which we call the soča trout, or soška postrv — sorry about the tongue twister!) is also a gem. Many years ago this wonderful trout only survived in a tiny region and human ignorance nearly caused its extinction. Many enthusiastic local fishermen and equally enthusiastic scientists managed to research this fish and protect it for future centuries. The marvelous marble trout, seemingly carved from the white rocks of the Julian Alps, is now the pride of the Soča.

I've already prepared my plan for a book on the marble trout. Perhaps its title will be The Marvelous Tale of the Marble Trout, but I'm not certain yet. I'll let the title grow through subsequent posts and let it happen naturally at the end. In between I will also write a few other things. I've experienced too much to avoid a digression here and there. If something beyond fly-fishing and fish catches my pen, so be it.

Finally, I must add; if you write a blog, you also hope for readers. I hope some people will find this reading interesting. Many fly-fishermen come to the Soča from many lands. So that more people can learn of the happenings and mishaps in our land of the Soča I will write in both Slovenian and English (with some translation help from my son).