A Dutch sailor on the next pontoon in Lorient asked me, very seriously, where he could buy a French fishing licence before he dropped a line over the side. I told him he did not need one. He did not believe me, so we found the rules together, and that conversation is more or less this article.
Recreational sea fishing in France is one of the rare things that is simpler for the visiting boater than the paperwork-heavy mess of customs and Schengen. But "no licence" is not the same as "no rules", and the rules have teeth.
No licence for the sea. A licence for fresh water.
Get this distinction right and most of the confusion disappears.
Sea fishing for your own pot, whether from the beach, the rocks, or your own boat, does not require a permit in France. You can trail a line behind the boat, jig for mackerel, set a few pots, and you need no card and no payment for the privilege. The one condition that underpins everything: the catch is for personal consumption only. You may never sell it.
Fresh water is the opposite. The moment you fish a river, a canal pound, or a lake, you are in licence territory and you must hold a permit from the local fishing association. This catches out cruisers on the French canals, who assume the no-licence sea rule follows them inland. It does not. If you fancy fishing from the boat while moored on the Canal du Midi, you buy a freshwater permit first. Different world, different rules entirely.
So: salt water, no licence. Fresh water, licence required. The rest of this is about the sea, because that is where most visiting cruisers fish.
The size that everyone gets wrong: bass at 42 cm
The single most important number for a foreign angler in French waters is the minimum size for sea bass: 42 centimetres. Below that, it goes back in the water. This is well above the size limits some visitors are used to from home, and it trips people up constantly.
Bass is also tightly managed beyond size. Recreational bass fishing runs on a calendar and a daily bag limit that the authorities adjust year to year, so the exact allowance shifts. For 2026 the recreational season and a low single-figure daily limit per angler apply, and the precise figure is the one thing I would check on an official French source before you sail, because it has moved several times in recent years. Treat two to three fish per person per day as the order of magnitude and verify the current cap.
Every species has its own minimum landing size. A few worth knowing if you are cruising the Atlantic or the Med:
- Sea bass: 42 cm. The big one to remember.
- Other common targets (bream, mackerel, pollack and so on) each carry their own minimum, posted by the maritime authorities and the local fishing federations.
If you keep something under size and a fisheries officer checks you, the fact you are a foreigner on a foreign-flagged boat is not a defence. Ignorance never is.
The marking rule that catches everyone
Here is the one that genuinely surprised me, and that I have never seen on any other coast. Any fish you keep from recreational sea fishing must be marked, and the mark is a physical one: you cut off the lower lobe of the tail fin.
The point is to make the fish visibly non-commercial, so it can never re-enter the supply chain and be sold. It applies to the species the rule covers (bass and several others), and an officer checking your cool box expects to see those tails clipped. A whole, sellable-looking bass in your fridge is exactly what they are looking for.
So the workflow on my boat: catch, measure against a sticker I keep on the cockpit coaming marked at 42 cm, and if it is a keeper, the tail gets clipped before it goes in the box. Sounds fussy. Takes two seconds. Saves an argument.
Where you can and cannot fish
The licence-free freedom does not mean fish-anywhere freedom. Several zones are off limits or restricted, and as a visitor you will not know them by instinct.
Marine protected areas and national parks carry their own rules. Inside the Port-Cros national park and the marine reserves, recreational fishing is heavily restricted or banned outright, and the Calanques national park near Marseille publishes specific recreational fishing rules you must follow. Spearfishing has its own age and equipment regulations and is banned in many of the same zones. When in doubt inside a park, assume you cannot, and read the park's own notices.
There is also the coastal swimming band to respect. Within 300 metres of the shore you are speed-limited and, in marked bathing zones, you have no business trailing hooks among swimmers. I cover that boundary properly in my piece on swimming, snorkelling and beach landings in France, and it matters as much to anglers as to anyone with a propeller.
Gear limits, pots, and the things that get you fined
The no-licence freedom comes with quiet limits on how much gear you can deploy, and these are where casual fishermen drift into trouble.
There is a cap on the number of lines and the number of pots or traps a recreational angler may use from a boat. The exact numbers are set by the maritime authorities and you should confirm the current figures, but the principle is that you are an angler, not a small commercial operation. A boat trailing a dozen lines and a string of twenty pots is no longer recreational in the eyes of an officer, and that is precisely the line the rules exist to draw.
Pots bring their own etiquette and their own hazards. A pot dropped in a fairway, a harbour approach, or an anchorage is a navigation menace, and a buoyed line across a channel is the fastest way to foul somebody's propeller and ruin two boats' afternoons. I set mine well clear of any track a boat would take, mark them clearly, and lift them before I move on. Leaving gear behind, ghost-fishing on the seabed, is both illegal in spirit and the kind of thing that turns locals against visiting boats.
Then there are the closed seasons and species-specific bans that move year to year. Some species cannot be taken at all in certain months; others have catch caps far stricter than bass. Shellfish gathering has its own water-quality and seasonal rules, and an officer checking your haul knows exactly what should and should not be in it for the date. None of this requires a licence. All of it requires you to have checked.
What I actually do, season after season
My setup is deliberately modest, because I fish to eat, not to compete.
A couple of feathered mackerel rigs, a light spinning rod for bass over the rocky ground, and two collapsible pots I am careful about where I set, because pots left in a fairway are a navigation hazard and a quick way to make enemies in a small port. I keep the 42 cm sticker on the coaming, a small knife for the tail mark, and a printed note of the current bass limit taped inside a locker, updated each spring.
The honest pleasure of it is that France makes recreational sea fishing genuinely accessible to a visiting boat. No card, no fee, no booking. You drop a line and you might eat well tonight. The flip side, the part the Dutch sailor in Lorient took a while to accept, is that the freedom is conditional. Keep undersized fish, sell your catch, or fish a protected zone, and the consequences fall on you regardless of which flag flies on your stern.
Measure your fish. Clip the tails. Check the bass limit each year on a French official source. Do those three things and you can fish your way down the entire French coast without a single piece of paper.
