Fishing the Seine proves a tough challenge for world's leading anglers

The view was beyond compare: the Ile de la Cité with the towers of Notre Dame beyond. The only problem was that Andries Noordman had not come the 3,000 miles from South Africa to Paris to admire the view. He had come to fish in the Seine and there were no fish, or not many.

What a fool, you might say, why come to Paris to fish? Well, it was not Mr Noordman's idea, nor that of the other 300 anglers from 37 countries who were taking part in the 48th World Fishing Championships in the heart of the French capital yesterday.

They had been promised that the Seine had recovered tremendously from its profound pollution of the 1960s and 1970s. There were 23 different kinds of fish in the river, including trout, pike and perch, they were told, some measuring two metres (6ft 7in) in length and weighing more than 45kg (100lb).

This may be so. You certainly do see Parisians fishing in the Seine and they do occasionally catch a fish. None the less, someone must have warned the creatures to swim well away from the city over the championship weekend.

"It's been terrible," said Mr Noordman, 32, from the Orange Free State. "Very disappointing. I've caught a few perch and a few kreggers [tiddlers] but it's been hard work and not much fun."

Two French fishermen, André and Jean-Philippe, from the Paris suburbs, were drinking wine and eating sausages on the upper quays beside the Louvre. "Everyone is complaining. Everyone is finding it hard to catch anything," André said. "It was a mistake, you see, to have the competition in the city. If you go out into the suburbs a little way, there's plenty of fish in the Seine. But not around here [he pointed towards the Musée d'Orsay]. Perhaps there are too many pleasure boats or too many Parisians peeing in the river."

Despite enormous efforts to clean the Seine, and the improvement brought by the retreat of heavy industry from the city, the head of the Seine-Normandie river authority had warned that the waterway was still far from pure.

Pierre-Alain Roche said that until the 1970s the river had been "like a drug-addict in a coma. The river had to be admitted to emergency care and now it's feeling a little better," he said.

This was the first time that the world championships had been held in a large city for many years and the first time in Paris since 1956.

Disappointed anglers complained that the decision had been made for public relations reasons, not sporting reasons. The organisers had thought that the championship would achieve more publicity if it took place in a capital city such as Paris, rather than on a quiet bend of a river in la France profonde.

The contestants, competing for a national and individual titles, drew lots for their places on the river bank in five locations within the city. They were given long, green keep-nets in which to preserve their catches until weighing time. All fish were to be returned to the river after the final weigh-in. The championship has a no-kill policy. A good job, it seems.

Pleasure boats continued to ply the river, although they were ordered to keep to the bank away from the anglers. Since most of the contestants had huge rods, more than 12 metres (40ft) long, which reached into the centre of the river, the Bateaux-mouches (riverboats) and others still constituted a nuisance.

"And there's another thing," said Mr Noordman, used to fishing in the wide open spaces of Africa. "We were forbidden to come to the river by car or truck. Getting on the Metro, loaded with fishing tackle, is not easy, I can tell you."