The Bandiat is a minor Dronne tributary, a quiet limestone stream running through the oak woods and water-meadows of the Nontron country in northern Dordogne. It is small enough to ignore on a map, significant enough to hold wild brown trout in reasonable numbers, and obscure enough that reliable English-language information about it barely exists. This is the sort of river where you find out about the good beats by knowing someone who knows someone at the local AAPPMA, and where the best day you have ever had on a small stream is not impossible. The Bandiat is limestone-fed like the rest of the Dronne system — stable flows, clear water, strong summer weed, and wild trout that behave accordingly. Hatches are dominated by small olives, caddis, and terrestrials in the warmer months. Fish it short, stay low, and treat it as a stalking river rather than a prospecting one. The middle reaches around Nontron and Javerlhac are the most productive water. The groundwater buffering keeps the river in condition for most of the season, though it does warm through July and August when the flow drops and the surface weed takes over.
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.
- Limestone
