Outdoors column: Fishing expedition adds color overseas to Paris journey
I had no intention of fishing the Seine on our recent trip to Paris.
It kind of just happened, and I’m glad it did.
I had fished overseas once before, lugging my fly fishing gear over to Ireland. I hadn’t engaged a guide beforehand, and couldn’t connect with one, so that didn’t help. Also, there was a drought that summer, at least by Irish standards, and I was told it was impossible to catch anything under such conditions. I was stubborn about it, though, decided to go out on my own, and finally, after much effort, managed to land a solitary Irish trout on a dry fly in one of the lakes in the Gap of Dunloe.
That was my first “international” fish.
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Again, there was no thought to try for a second in Paris, but the opportunity presented itself one day in between all the other things we were trying to fit in during our visit to the astounding “City of Lights.”
The thing is, while staying for a week right on the river on the Ile St. Louis, maybe three football fields from the back door of Notre Dame, I never saw one person fishing. The Seine contains plenty of fish - zander (the same family as walleye and really pretty much the same thing) perch, catfish, carp, and as many as three dozen other species. Last year, an angler landed a Wels catfish just downstream from the Louve that was at least five feet long and had to weigh at least 60 pounds. In 2009, salmon began to run through the city for the first time in more than 100 years.
However, the river was a bit high and dark while we were there, and was busy beyond belief with tour boats, dinner boats, a few pleasure craft, and 300-foot barges of all descriptions going up and down and all around like it was Times Square.
No matter. We met our guide Arnaud at his apartment on the Left Bank. It was a heavily misty morning, but Arnaud provided us with coffee and wonderful croissants – all of the croissants in Paris were wonderful, of course – and all was well. He led us – Lizzie, Annie, Henry, and me – across the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris (completed in 1607) and onto the Ile de la Cite.
We fished the south channel of the river, but I had a pretty good notion we weren’t going to do well. The boat traffic hadn’t started yet, but the river was indeed brown and moving pretty quickly. Had I been on my own, I’d have been using bait, but Arnaud had us casting plastics on jig heads. I also was a bit disheartened by the equipment. Arnaud’s tackle was a bit beat up, and the selection of lures was very limited.
We cast and cast and talked and talked, but we caught no fish. We moved to the downstream point of the island, failed to do anything, then walked upstream a bit and fished the north channel. No dice, but The kids were having fun, even if we were getting soaked, and Arnaud was a genial host. He also was an expert at freeing snags.
“You let the river work for you,” he told me as he expertly rescued yet another lure from the bottom of the Seine.
At one point, Lizzie asked him if anyone actually ever caught a fish on his trips. A bold question, but Arnaud was unfazed.
“About 50 percent of the time,” he said.
But not this time. So what? We were having fun and we weren’t going to keep any fish despite the claims I’ve read of how much cleaner the Seine is than years ago.
“The fish here is for picture only,” Arnaud said. “Not to eat.”
Arnaud’s English wasn’t perfect, but it was very good, and it was a thousand times better than my French.
Well, I wish I had a photo of a fish I caught from the Seine, but I don’t. Still, it was a great if wet morning, the kids had fun doing something other than sightseeing, and Arnaud was a charming Frenchman.
Before and after that adventure, Paris occupied us in a thousand different ways. I found it to be much like Rome and Florence, an assault on the senses and almost too much to take in, immense and astounding.
And I’d like to get this out of the way:
I had heard many times that the French didn’t much like Americans, or that they were very prideful, sometimes rude and snooty. In fact, I heard that again recently from a friend, and then again from another. Non, non! In my limited experience, I found the French to be very mindful and proud of their history and culture, with an obvious love of monuments and huge, beautiful public buildings, but I also found them to be terrific to deal with. There was not a person in the service industry or any police officer – and there were police and security all over the place, thanks in part to the terrorist trial that was going on at the Palais de Justice, quite close to us – or any guide or private citizen who was anything but friendly and cordial. More than once we were helped immensely by kindly Francais who went the extra mile for us, including a couple that quickly came to our aide when we dumped our luggage halfway into and halfway out of the departing AirTrain when we got back to JFK.
The courtesy and genuine friendliness made touring this amazing city all the more enjoyable. And it was extremely enjoyable. You can’t go into severely damaged Notre Dame now – it is supposed to be repaired by 2024 for the Olympics – but you can visit everything else, and there is so much of it that it would take a long, long time to get it all covered: Notre Dame, Sainte Chappelle, the Catacombs, the memorial to those who were sent to the concentration camps, the Louvre, Versailles, the Eiffel Tower – which I found stupefying – the Tuileries, the multitude of beautiful buildings, the magnificently decorated churches, many art galleries, the profusion of sidewalk cafes, the boulangeries, al fresco lunches on the banks of the river, street performers.
And we stumbled onto a couple of religious processions – one dedicated to the end of the war in Ukraine – that I found very impressive and moving.
We didn’t encounter many Americans. French visitors were very much in evidence, obviously, along with Italians, Germans, Spaniards, and English. I did run into several Buffalo Bills fans who had no trouble identifying me as a kindred soul since I think I wore some kind of Bills shirt most days.
I hope to get back to Paris someday, and maybe catch a fish in the Seine.
Outdoors Notebook
The annual Sauquoit Creek spring cleanup was back this year after a two-year hiatus because of the COVID crisis, and workers made a big haul.
The event was organized by Don Hahn, and sponsored by the Federate Sportsmen’s Clubs of Oneida County and the Mohawk Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited, with assistance from the Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Authority. Piggy Pat’s parking lot in Washington Mills served as headquarters.
More than 60 bags of trash and numerous miscellaneous objects were collected in selected areas between New York Mills and Cassville by nearly two dozen volunteers, including members of Boy Scout Troop 14 and other youngsters.
Write to John Pitarresi at 60 Pearl Street, New Hartford, N.Y. 13413 or jcpitarresi41@gmail.com or call him at 315-724-5266.
This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Outdoors: Fishing expedition in Paris, France
