The Bresle rises in the hills above Aumale and runs seventy kilometres to its tidal mouth at Le Tréport. For the last thirty of those kilometres — from Blangy-sur-Bresle through Gamaches to Eu — it is the most productive sea-trout river in France. Runs enter the system from June onwards, peaking in late July and August when warm nights coincide with low summer water. Fish the classical way: a floating line, a size 8 or 10 Medicine or Peter Ross, cast across and slightly down, swung through the pool tails in the last hour of light and the first hours of darkness. Numbers do not match the Welsh rivers and the fish are not as large as the Scottish, but a good night on the Bresle in August can produce three or four fish. Salmon are present in small numbers. The AAPPMA controls most of the water, and the best beats are below Eu.
In chalk-spring and karst trout systems, generally stable temperatures broaden olive and other mayfly activity from early spring into autumn, with strong evening caddis, steady subsurface scuds and buzzers where clear groundwater and weedbeds develop, and terrestrials from meadow and woodland banks rounding out the food calendar, depending on how fast each river drops and clears after rain.
- Chalk
