The culture of fishing can vary from country to country. One place I’ve had the good fortune to do a fair bit of tenkara, as described previously in Tenkara Angler, is Switzerland. Despite the vast contrast between its rushing mountain streams and the low slow waters of my home in the Wisconsin Driftless Area, with a tenkara stick in my hand I feel at home in the Swiss Alps.
There are probably a few reasons for this (besides the obvious one of all that good chocolate). One is that the Alps are home to my partner (in both life and tenkara), Corina. Below her right palm, on the inside of her wrist where you can feel the beat of her heart, she has a tattoo of the geographic coordinates of her mountain village, and I feel at home where she does.
I also find satisfaction, like many of us, in catching a native trout – in outsmarting, landing and having a close look at a trout that evolved in relationship with the very stream I’m standing in. And in Switzerland, nearly every stream trout is native; mostly beautiful native browns, although grayling can be found in some waters.
Other reasons that Switzerland can feel like home are rooted in my alignment with some interesting ways the Swiss manage their trout. For example, in Switzerland anglers are required by law to record every trout caught. Back home in Wisconsin I’ve always enjoyed logging in a journal every trout I land – perhaps it’s the biologist meeting the writer in me. I also find it helps to sharpen my attention, to prod me to think more analytically about why I succeeded in catching, or not, a particular trout. And so in Switzerland I fit right in. Upon landing a trout, the date, location, species and length of fish must be immediately recorded in either an official paper booklet provided by the canton, or on a phone app (always the booklet for analog me).
Second, the Swiss, like me, aren’t into strict catch-and-release fishing. By law, every trout caught above a minimum legal length must be immediately and humanely killed and added to your creel. Consequently, once you’ve reached the daily bag limit (generally four), your trout fishing is over for the day. The minimum size keeper – or what devoted catch & releasers might call the maximum size trout you can legally release – varies by water, but is commonly either 24 or 26 cm (about 9.5 or 10.25 inches).
The regs for some streams also frame a slot, with a provision added at the far end that all trout larger than 34 cm ( 13.4 inches) must also be released. Given that trout grow somewhat slowly in these beautiful yet cold and nutrient-thin alpine waters, in the few years I’ve been casting fixed lines into Swiss streams, the limit of four keepers has invariably allowed me plenty of fishing. Some days I’ve caught twenty or thirty trout before hitting my limit of four keepers.
This Swiss law is anchored mainly in considerations of animal welfare. In the Swiss view, it’s unethical to hook and stress a fish just for fun. Either fish for the frying pan, or get outdoors for fun in some other way – play some footie or climb a mountain. The Swiss law probably looks a bit odd to anglers on our North American side of the pond, where an ethic of catch & release has taken hold (and where there tends to be lower tolerance for government regulations). But the Swiss way works for me.
Swiss anglers I’ve talked with universally report a decline in stream trout numbers in recent decades (it must have been really good in the past, because as you can see from my trout log, it’s still good now!). It’s fair to wonder if the requirement to keep trout has played a role in this decline. I recently had a chance to sit down and talk about this and other trout topics with Roland Tomaschett, who for the past 18 years has been the Swiss government’s fish manager in Corina’s area of the Alps, in the canton of Graubünden.
Roland is an interesting guy. Like Corina, he’s one of only about 40,000 native speakers of Romansh, one of wee Switzerland’s four official languages (along with German, French and Italian). The persistence of Romansh in isolated valleys in the Alps marks a remnant footprint of the Roman Empire. As the empire shrank toward a vanishing point about 1500 years ago, some legionnaires remained behind and settled in these isolated mountain valleys. Their Latin language remained with them, and over the following centuries evolved to what we know and hear today as Romansh.
Roland grew up in the Romansh-speaking valley where we met for a chat, and he knows its rivers and streams well. He doesn’t believe that the requirement to keep all legal size trout landed has had an impact on Swiss trout populations. For one, there is an individual season bag limit of 60 trout. Once you’ve kept 60 trout, your season is over for the year. So it’s not as if you could keep four trout per day for a hundred days in a row. There’s a sustainable cap. Roland also noted that the mandatory ‘add-to-your-creel’ rule allows some discretion on the part of the angler. If an angler lands a trout he or she believes is ecologically significant, its release is allowed. I’ve applied that exception myself a few times, such as when I’ve landed a late season female obviously plump with eggs. But the Swiss federal law clearly states that it is illegal to fish with the intention of catch & release only – and this is why your season is over once you’ve creeled 60 legal-sized trout (which in fact few anglers achieve, according to Roland).
Roland points the finger at two other culprits in the decline of the Swiss stream trout fishery: foremost is the Swiss propensity (and need) to build hydropower dams on their mountain streams, and the second is climate change. The impacts of dams are obvious and easy to grasp, but Roland believes that at least one impact of climate change is showing up in a more indirect way: herons. The European grey heron (cousin and ecological equivalent of our great blue heron in North America) was formerly an infrequent visitor to the Alps. It is more common further south, in the milder climes of Italy. With the weather warming, grey herons have been expanding north out of Italy, and the bird is now a more common sight than previously along streams of the Swiss Alps, doing its thing, searching for trout and other fish and aquatic bites.
But there’s still enough wild trout to go around, and I’ll continue to enjoy exploring streams of the Alps, and casting a kebari into these gorgeous clear waters, with a piece of fine chocolate tucked in my pocket. Last year I became the first foreign member of the Uniun da Pescadurs Mustér, the local fishing club in Corina’s home village, and Corina became the club’s first female member. We are also now the only fixed-liners in the club, and some other members have taken an interest in our methods, and our success with them. Perhaps tenkara will soon become more of the Swiss way of trout…
Do you have a story to tell? A photo to share? A fly recipe that’s too good to keep secret? If you would like to contribute content to Tenkara Angler, click HERE for more details.
When you buy something using the retail links within our articles or Gear Shop, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Tenkara Angler does not accept money for editorial gear reviews. Read more about our policy.