New guy here saying hi from Germany

[legion]

Hello everyone!

I'm Diego from Germany and excited to join this forum. I fished pretty much my entire life but only started fly fishing in 2017 and have been hooked ever since - my other fishing gear is rusting in the cellar now! My fly casting is probably not as good as what I've seen most members do here. Thanks to Paul's video series I have improved quite a bit. Hoping to improve my casting even further but I definitely need to work on my timing and stop creeping

Fishing is a big part of my life and I love it so much! In fact so much I decided to make it my career - not as a fishing guide, not as commercial fisherman but as an engineer working for the restoration of surface waters. Since Germany is - from an angling standpoint - unfortunately heavily industrialized, so have the rivers and lochs been changed by human activity over the past centuries in order to cultivate more arable land and take control of floods. My work is to reverse these measures wherever possible, but it's still a long way to go and unfortunately underfunded. Small steps at a time... Current fish populations need to be stabilized through stocking pretty much everywhere - my dream come true would be to have self-sustaining fish populations in our waters and allow fish to freely migrate through our rivers someday.

I'm happy to meet you all!
Cheers!

[Paul Arden]

Hi Diego,

Hello and a big welcome to the Board! Great that you have joined us

Which part of Germany do you live? That’s a really great job that you have. It must be very difficult to restore a river that naturally floods and changes course (which people don’t want because it washes their houses away!) - but the river naturally requires (lowland rivers anyway).

I have a house on the Drava river near the Mura/Drava confluence which I believe was the last major unmanaged confluence on the Danube system. Some years ago they realised that left to its own devices it was going to wash away a railway station and so it was planned to manage this confluence with walls. There was a bit of a hullabaloo. Fortunately, despite the project being approved, it didn’t happen because the river changed course and ultimately didn’t wash out the station. It’s an interesting river, lots of backwaters and oxbow lakes, but totally messed up because of upstream dams. It used to have Huchen (Danube Salmon) but not any more.

If you upload a video of your casting to YouTube you can link to the board using the “media embed” box in the Full Editor & Preview page. We don’t need to see the loop (to start with), only the top half of the body and some of the rod (not necessary to see the tip). Casting to a target say 40-50’ away.

Petri Heil!

Cheers, Paul