Fly-Fishing the 41st by James Prosek Read Free Book Online Page A

in the Seine was magnificent. The last one caught in Paris was in 1956.” Pierre stopped to carry Marlin up the steps to Pont Neuf again by the statue of Henri IV. “Well, who knows,” he continued, “maybe we will get one tomorrow morning. Maybe Guy and Jean-Pierre will join us. We’ll fish until about nine in the morning and then we must go and set up for the fly-fishing salon. ”
    Â 
    That night, I slept wrapped in a wool blanket on the floor of Pierre’s office. At eight he knocked on the door, came in with his key, and woke me. “Well, we slept too late,” he said, standing over me, “but that’s okay, I think. We have a long day ahead.” He looked at his watch. “We’ll walk down to Ile Saint-Louis anyway, to see if Guy and Jean-Pierre caught anything. We’ll leave the rods behind this morning.”
    Guy and Jean-Pierre lived in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. A chef in a school cafeteria and a landscape worker in a cemetery, they supplemented their meager incomes by fishing most every weekday morning before work and selling their catches to local restaurants. As far as Pierre knew they were the only commercial fishermen in Paris, and illegal ones at that. Their most coveted catch was the zander—or, as Americans called it, walleye—a sweet, white-fleshed fish, although they also got a good price for eel, silure, and carp. Guy and Jean-Pierre could earn up to a third of their normal monthly incomes through their fishing.
    Pierre and I walked along the Seine on the quai des Orfèvres to the façade of a newly renovated Notre-Dame cathedral, dim and ominous in the morning light. “They are wonderful fishermen, these guys,” Pierre told me of Guy and Jean-Pierre. “I met them four years ago fishing on Ile de la Cité. One of them had caught a ten-kilo zander. I couldn’t believe it! So I started to follow them and fish with them and made a small film of their fishing. I gave Guy a cell phone to call me if they caught a big fish, and would ride my bicycle down to the river with my camera. I got them sponsorships through American fishing tackle manufacturers, so they have good free equipment. They mostly fish with worms and they are very skilled. It takes a great deal of skill to fish a worm correctly—as much as it does to fish a wet fly.”
    At this hour of the morning Paris was quiet and the city belonged to the fishermen. The river was eggshell brown and made the limestone façades of the city buildings seem more luminous yellow and the zinc roofs a deeper gray. “They’re out there, see?” Pierre said as we crossed Pont Saint-Louis to the île. The fishermen were two dark shapes on the tip of the island standing with their lines in the water.
    â€œâ€™ Jour , Pierre,” one greeted as we approached them. They had caught a bream and killed it. It lay bloodied on the cobbles. I shook their hands.
    â€œWell”—Pierre looked into the opaque water—“if the bream are here the silure should be too,” he said. We stayed and watched them for a half hour, after which time neither Guy nor Jean-Pierre had caught a fish, so we left to go set up booths at the fly-fishing exhibition.
    Â 
    The Salon de la Pêche à la Mouche was an annual fly-fishing exposition at the Espace Auteuil near the Bois de Boulogne in west Paris. Represented there were a hundred or more vendors from Austria, Belgium, France, Holland, and Iceland, selling everything from flies and fly rods, wine and swine, to antique salmon spears and trips to exotic destinations.
    Pierre was certainly the prince of the show—everyone seemed to know him. He filmed and aired a weekly fishing program on French television and edited a fishing magazine called Pêches Sportives. When we got to the space, Carole, his wife, was setting up a booth with some of Pierre’s antique tackle and fishing books. I was