FLY FISHING IN UKRAINE

This morning, at around 5am European time, as usual I checked my phone to see how much more I could stay in bed, but the screen was filled with alerts telling the world that Russia had invaded Ukraine. As everyone else I was stunned by the horror of the war.

One day I was in a cab in New York with my wife and the driver kept looking at her in the rearview mirror. He finally spoke to her in Russian. She asked him to repeat himself, and he said in English Are you Ukrainian? My wife answered that her family was from Minsk and Odessa. He then said, as his eyes lit up: Aaaaah Odessa girls… with a smile that let us imagine that he was Ukrainian himself and that his head was full of memories of happy days.

So this morning, we, like the whole world, thought about Ukraine. And then I said to myself that Ukraine, three hours by plane from France, was the Carpathians and that when I hear Carpathians, of course I think of Dracula, but I think especially of the graylings and the trout of the rivers which are unknown to us.

So I searched and I found this, Fly Fishing in Ukraine a site about fly fishing in the Ukrainian Carpathians where obviously the trout end up more often in the plates than they return to the river! But that’s how it is, other countries, other customs! And then there is this film, with these trout, these landscapes and these graylings. Finally, this whole story is very sad, heartbreaking.