All to discover
Let's continue down the Dunière. Leaving Laval to follow the river downstream, we enter a smiling valley surrounded by hay meadows. A Japanese-style footbridge crosses the river and immediately evokes Claude Monet and his garden at Giverny. A little further on, a camping area welcomes tourists, most of them Dutch.
At Vaubarlet, access to the river is easy and well suited to those new to the difficult discipline of trout fishing. It's here that I, too, began my love affair with fishing.
At that time in my life, I was at the age when everything was waiting to be discovered, constantly assailed by a multitude of new sensations: smells above all, but also contact with animals and the empathy that goes with it. The images of an unusual place where you'd never been before make these first times magical moments that will remain forever etched in your subconscious as a man in the making.
My very first trout
I must have been approaching ten when I first went to Vaubarlet. My father had bought me all the equipment I needed for spinning: a fiberglass rod, a spinning reel with twenty-hundredths nylon line and a box filled with spoons of various sizes. When I opened the lid, I thought my father had played a joke on me. Catching fish with these bits of junk, no matter how beautifully decorated, seemed highly unlikely.
However, not wishing to disappoint him, I fixed one of these strange contraptions to the end of my line and, under his watchful and benevolent gaze, made a few throws. Although the first throws were rather clumsy, I soon acquired a certain dexterity at this little game. Knowing that my father was watching me, I concentrated on sending my lure into the middle of the riverbed. Then this incredible thing happened: my tip suddenly bent and I felt the rod quiver in my arm. I had just caught my very first trout. What an exhilarating moment!
Little did I know at the time, that if the trout had been lured, it was I who had taken the bait of a passion that would never let me go.
The emotion was so strong that I became, and have remained, a passionate fisherman.
