I have put this thread here as i think it goes a bit beyond of just flyfishing in Slovenia, as it nicely shows what rivers are able to do, if they are not stocked. Majority if not all slovene flyfishing waters are more or less heavily stocked, but we still have such pearls. If there is an interest in this, i can add some more photos.

A few weeks ago we had to electrofish a small section of a river as they were reinforcing the bank, creating a weir etc. This section is unstocked in contrast with many well known slovene rivers, which are massively stocked to please turists, at least that is the excuse. For example, waters of one fishing club were stocked with 2 millions fish in 5 years. Such things are of course not presented to turist. This river here is the opposite of that. It hasen`t been stocked for ta least 15 years. We were taking fish from approx. 100m of this small river. This area was a nursing habitat for juvenile fish as you can see from bottom structure:



I would estimate that there were at least 500 juvenile graylings, rainbows and brown trouts in this stretch, before it was dried, a nice example of how river can take care of itself, if we give it a chance. This section is also interesting becouse in the last 20 years, wild rainbows prevailed over brownies. in 93 this section dried dues to too high water removal rates upstream. At that time this was almost pure brown trout water with graylings and a few pockets of wild rainbows. When the water was empty, wild rainbows prevailed.

Here is a bucket of rescued fish, one of many. It is a mix of 0+ graylings, wild rainbows and some bullheads:



A portrait of bullheads, which are an important trout food:



A small wild 0+ rainbow from same river:



a bunch of small rainbows:



That was a big fellow:



and another mix, this time including brownies and, for the lack of proper english name, a stream barbel:



A movie from same river, showing wild rainbows and one brownie a couple of days ago:

" title="tolmun.mp4 video by JureM - Photobucket" target="_blank">tolmun.mp4 video by JureM - Photobucket