A Day and a Fish in Sardinia

“But it still reminds me of Malta: lost between Europe and Africa and belonging to nowhere. Belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere. To Spain and the Arabs and the Phoenicians most. But as if it had never really had a fate. No fate. Left outside of time and history.”     –  Sea and Sardinia, D.H. Lawrence

In June I flew to Sardinia, the large island west of the Italian mainland, for a gathering with my older sister Anne and her family, most of whom live in Italy. My daughter Alonda flew in from New York to join us, to the delight of both her pop and the Italian crew. I’d visited Sardinia once before, in the 1980s with my sister and her then three young kids. Those kids, my nephews and niece, now have small children of their own, and it was time for a raduno – a get-together. The Italians chose Sardinia, and fine with me, especially given that the island is home to a native salmonid, Mediterranean trout Salmo cetti. 

Two years ago I wrote about chasing these fish, brown trout cousins, in Sicily, after another family gathering there (my brother-in-law, my sister’s husband, is Sicilian). And so when packing this time for Sardinia, I again added to my bag a couple of tenkara sticks, divining rods for finding trout. I chose rods of two lengths to cover most of the likely scenarios in the dry Mediterranean landscape, and made it an all DRAGONtail trip, with my excellent NIRVANA Kokoro rods in 360 cm and 400 cm.  For Sardinia in June, wet wading would be enough, and I was able to fit everything I might need, including a couple of spare rod tips and a small NIRVANA Folding Creek Net, into just carry-ons.  

When traveling to and through an unfamiliar part of the world, it’s good to have a good book about the place. Not so much a travel guide, but stories of the land and its people. And not to substitute for your experience of the place, but deepen it. Last year while fishing in Portugal I had the excellent The Last Old Place by fly fisher Datus Proper. For this trip to Sardinia my companion was D.H Lawrence’s sublime 1921 travel memoir, Sea and Sardinia.

More than a hundred years apart, Lawrence (David Herbert to his mother) and I had the same starting point for our Sardinian adventures, the southern port city of Cagliari. I arrived by plane, and Lawrence reached it by boat from Sicily in January 1921. From the airport I made my way north along the eastern coast in a rental car, toward the rendezvous with my family in the seaside town of Costa Rei. I paralleled an inland route that Lawrence and his wife Frieda took by train. The hardscrabble land I saw out my car window probably looked much the same as they saw then from their train windows. 

“Sardinia is another thing. Much wider, much more ordinary, not up-and-down at all, but running away into the distance. Unremarkable ridges of moor-like hills running away, perhaps to a bunch of dramatic peaks on the southwest. This gives a sense of space, which is so lacking in Italy. Lovely space about one, and traveling distances – nothing finished, nothing final. It is like liberty itself, after the peaky confinement of Sicily. Room– give me room – give me room for my spirit: and you can have all the toppling crags of romance.”

Although the rough Sardinian land has probably not changed much, other things of course have. Lawrence described traditional Sardinian costumes he saw, works of art in clothing, and reflective of the diverse and vibrant local cultures still evident on the island during his travels. 

“But that curious, flashing black-and-white costume! I seem to have known it before: to have worn it even: to have dreamed it. To have dreamed it: to have an actual contact with it. It belongs in some way to something in me – to my past, perhaps. I don’t know. But the uneasy sense of blood familiarity haunts me. I know I have known it before.  … And my nostalgia for something I know not what was not an illusion. I feel it again, at once, at the sight of the men in frieze and linen, a heart yearning for something I have known, and which I want back again.”

“And there in front we saw a glitter of scarlet and white. It was in slow motion. It was a far-off procession, scarlet figures of women, and a tall image moving away from us, slowly, in the Sunday morning… A close procession of women glittering in scarlet, white and black, moving slowly in the distance beneath the grey-yellow buildings of the village on the crest, towards an isolated old church…”

Alas, this part of Sardinia has since given over to the dull homogeny of jeans and fashion. Yet still today on the island if you keep your eyes open, as the song says “wonders never cease”:

And remarkably, more than a hundred year earlier, Lawrence wrote this about something he saw in Sardinia:  “…one strapping glass in the pink and scarlet costume, who looked for all the world like a bunch of red and rose-pink geraniums”.

But let’s talk about fishing. Through a breadcrumb trail of contacts provided by my guide from the 2024 Sicily trip, Pepe, I found a guide in Sardinia who knew trout, Federico Di Gennaro. Federico and I worked things out through Whatsapp before I left Wisconsin, even though we wouldn’t have an ideal set-up. Costa Rei, the base with my family on Sardinia’s southeast coast, is diametrically opposite from Federico’s home base on the northwest side of the island, more than four hours drive away. But Federico knew some trout water about half way between us, and we agreed to meet there. And so before dawn one morning, while my family slept, I left Costa Rei in the rental car, headed further north into terra incognita.

Federico and Google had directed me to drive further up the coast for about an hour and a half,  and then turn left, inland, at the town of Baunei. The Google map I perused showed no terrain or contour lines, and I assumed that Baunei was just another version of Costa Rei, a pleasant but somewhat nondescript burg in flatlands along the coast. But after about an hour at the wheel, with the sun rising above the edge of the sea to my right, the road became a coil of switchbacks, up and up toward mountains. Eventually a cluster of civilization appeared in the distance, and I realized this must be Baunei. Wow, wow…! I took my life in my hands to snap this photo on the move from the narrow road:

Who goes to all the trouble of establishing a village up here, like an eyrie, within sight of the coast just several miles below, but in all practical terms of travel far removed from it? Probably people long ago seeking protection from raiders arriving by sea (in contrast, Costa Rei, right on the beach, was established only in the 1970s, as a vacation destination). Or as Lawrence observed:

“Usually, the life-level is reckoned as sea-level. But here, in the heart of Sardinia, the life-level is high as the golden-lit plateau, and the sea-level is somewhere far away, below, in the gloom, it does not signify. The life-level is high up, high and sun-sweetened and among rocks.”

As I pulled into sublime Baunei, I took in its mosaic of magnificent views, stone streets and ancient buildings, then paused to soak it all up and recharge over a cappuccino in the town’s center. Then a look at my watch, and as sunlight continued to spread across the slopes, I continued on, and soon met some confiding locals along the road:

“They tell me there used to be flocks of these donkeys, feeding half wild on the wild, moor-like hills of Sardinia. But the war – and also the imbecile wantoness of the war masters – consumed these flocks too, so that few are left. The same with the cattle. Sardinia, home of cattle, hilly little Argentina of the Mediterranean, is now almost deserted. It is war, say the Italiana. And also the wanton, imbecile, foul lavishness of the war masters. It was not alone the war which exhausted the world. It was the deliberate evil wastefulness of the warmakers in their own countries. Italy ruined Italy.”

Well, “ruined” may be an overstatement. Just after 8 a.m., with some relief and silent gratitude, I spotted Federico’s car parked along the small road that was our meeting point, in a wide, wild part of the island. This was my first time to meet him in person, and I took an immediate liking. The quality of some of my foreign fishing trips has depended largely on the quality of the guides, and I’ve been blessed to have good ones all along, from Croatia to Sicily to Portugal.  I would gladly return to fish with, and recommend, any of them. Federico already struck me as another in this line.  

When he isn’t fishing, Federico is a farmer. He has about a hectare of land (2.5 acres) with an olive grove and a vineyard. In just the previous week or so he’d completed his final qualifications to be an officially registered guide of the Associazione Italiana Guide Professionali di Pesca (A.I.GU.P.P), or ‘Association of Professional Italian Fishing Guides’. And he proudly wore the shirt to prove it. 

After the drive up from the coast, I now started to descend, following Federico’s car on the small, little-used road, into a valley framed in spectacular views.  

“The roads of Italy always impress me. They run undaunted over the most precipitous regions, and with curious ease. In England almost any such road, among the mountains at least, would be labelled three times dangerous and would be famous throughout the land as an impossible climb. Here it is nothing. Up and down they go, swinging about with complete sang-froid. There seems to have been no effort in their construction. They are so good, naturally that one hardly notices what splendid gestures they represent.”

“It was a wild, unusual landscape, of unusual shape. The hills seemed so untouched, dark-blue, virgin-wild…  And there seemed so little outlying life: nothing. No castles even. In Italy and Sicily castles perching everywhere. In Sardinia none – the remote, grappled hills rising darkly, standing outside of life.”

After about twenty minutes of again taking my life in my hands, by both gaping at the scenery and trying to keep an eye on the road and Federico’s car ahead, the road came to an end, in forest on the cooler, damper valley floor. And here was a rocky, untamed stream, Torrente Codula di Luna, ‘Moon Valley Creek’. A quick perusal showed this would be some beautiful fishing, and also challenging. The small water was pristinely clear, shallow, and interspersed with long, smooth pools. Utmost care in stealth would be the order of the day; and with forest crowding the banks, care on the back cast as well. 

Federico is mainly a spin fisherman and so didn’t have any particular advice on fly choice. In keeping with the trip’s DRAGONtail theme, I decided to see what trota sarda would think of one of my favorite ‘all water confidence flies’, an Oxford Wool Kebari Sakasa. I tied one on, and the 400 cm Kokoro and I went to work.

The day had emerged bright and hot, weather not exactly shouting ‘trout!’. And the water was quite warm, 70F (21C). But I’d learned from Pepe in Sicily, and affirmed by Federico, that Mediterranean trout have adapted to warmer conditions than their brown trout kin. Seventy degree water would be fine for these fish, and it wasn’t long before they proved it. I dropped the kebari at the head of one of the first long pools, and bam, fish on. I soon eased into the net a gorgeous foot-long Mediterranean trout, regal in the large black spots characteristic of the species. 

Federico commented that it was a good sized fish for this stream. The day was unfolding well.

And then, the fishing sort of fell off one of the cliffs around us. Despite the care we took, and various other fly patterns tried, we couldn’t raise another trout, and were seeing few. Federico had not long ago reconnoitered the stream, in cooler weather, and found trout. But today was one of those days, often bright and still days like this, when not only can’t you raise a fish, you hardly see any. That mysterious vanishing act trout sometimes pull.    

But there was compensation, in the beauty of the place, and lunch. As Lawrence wrote, “If one travels one eats”. We took a break along the stream, and Federico brought out a simple but wonderful meal of goat cheese made in a town nearby, salsiccia (cured pork sausage) from his mother’s home village in northern Sardinia, and a typical local flatbread, all rolled together in a sort of Sardinian burrito. Life was good and rich in that moment. 

After lunch (of which Federico insisted I take the rest and share with my family) we leapfrogged upstream to a shadier, cooler stretch of the torrente to see if the trout there were any more cooperative. 

Alas, they were not. It was tricky to get casts in here (even with the 360 cm), yet the trout didn’t appreciate the effort. Federico noted that, with summer more advanced, water levels were lower than on his recent reconnaissance trip, and this may have disrupted the fish. In any case, just one of those days. With the writing on the wall and long return drives ahead for both us, we packed up things by mid-afternoon.

I ended my one day of fishing in Sardinia with just one Mediterranean trout. But for such an outing the difference between one trout and a skunk is major (and I’m just glad for my guide’s sake that we found at least one!). And there was so much more to the day than the trout. It was the most magnificent one-trout day I’ve ever had.  

A final bit of luster was put on our outing when Federico gave me a parting gift of bottles of wine made from his own grapes. That’s a first from a fishing guide! What a capstone to a day with yet another fine guide in a sublime corner of the world.  

As one last gift, on my drive back, this sublime view of the other side of Baunei-above-the-sea, on the left:

“So that for us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery – back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness… Italy has given me back I know not what of myself, but a very, very great deal.”

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Federico knows more trout waters further north, and if anyone would like to explore and fish with him someday, reach out to me and I’ll put you in contact (but I can’t guarantee he’ll always have the wine!).

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