Le Mouching, fly fishing, la bataille de San romanoThe night had just started to fall (PAF…BOUM!). A few weak reflections blinked like the bedridden old folks when the priest enters their rooms. And me, I returned with a happy heart after hours of benediction in my dear river.

The fish? Oh… A few, not very fat, but so what. Every minute spent in the water is a minute less spent at the office of le Mouching, far from it’s infernal rhythms.

At the corner of the rue du Marechat Petain and the impasse Maurice Thorez I ran nose to nose, into four shady characters, whom I immediately recognized, thanks to the insignias on their caps: The head of a lion (in very bad taste).Le mouching, fly fishing, lion

Of course they were thugs from the terrible GANG LION, as dangerous as the plague and long standing enemies of le Mouching.

The reason is, these brutes practice fishing with a spoon. Yes, dear reader you heard me well: FISHING WITH A SPOON, the most vile of sorts. Their leader Ferdinand Mepps is an individual of unparalleled cruelty, even to the point of adding two additional barbs to each hook of his assassin spoons. That shows you the brutality of this monster!

But let’s return, if you will, to the corner of the impasse Maurice Thorez.

There I was encircled by the band of brutes, I put my back up against the closest wall scrutinizing every movement of these scoundrels, slowly I uncapped the tube that held my rod and extricated my fishing rod. All of my muscles were taut to the extreme, like the inner tube of a racing bike descending Mount Ventoux, that’s when the first assailant made a direct charge at me.

Le mouching, Fly fishing, samuraïAt that moment I must have resembled the friend of the celebrated actor Toshiro Mifune in that Kurosawa masterpiece “The Seven Samurais”, that guy with the face like a knife blade, the one who handled his samurai sword (the famous katana!) like no-one else.

With a rapid step to the right, I evaded my attacker and with my loyal fly rod, punctured his left eye. The screams from that rogue filled me with an intense joy and when the second attacker rushed me I plunged the point of my fly rod, with an assured gesture, down his throat. The rivers of blood in the pale light of the lamppost added a note of brutal poetry somewhat like that of the great Mallarme.

As for the third bastard of the GANG LION, my precise cast with a streamer, ordinarily destined for shark fishing, successfully ripped off the lobe of his right ear.

The fourth guy, the boss, the big shot of the group, Ferdinand Mepps in person (a cowardly piece of garbage!) seeing that I was (by far) untouchable, took off begging for mercy, running for his life; as I write these lines I’m told that he is still running in the far suburbs between Roubaix and Budapest.

Effortlessly I had defeated the GANG LION… thanks to my loyal split bamboo fly rod whose perfectly gracious architecture combined with it’s precision, are very close to the japanese training swords of the noble martial art of Kendo of which I am a passionate devotee.Le Mouching, fly fishing, kendo

Not that I denigrate the rods of carbon. Absolutely not! There are certainly pleasant ones, but… how can I put it… the Bamboo rod, perhaps because of it’s slightly archaic and artisanal aspect, possesses a humanity without equal. With the years that have passed I can affirm that this rod has become (like my  Deux Chevaux*) my most loyal friend.
*A 2-horsepower car produced from the 1948 to 1990 in France by Citroen.Le mouching, fly fishing, Flechy-san