Northern Sweden micro-clave aka The Traveling Hurries

Participants

Place

Date

Getting there

Weather

The river and the camp

The water is typically very clear at this time of the year in this area. In my experience moderate rains don't color the water. This was one of my favorite spots in the river, because the fish were feeding in the slow current at the start of the run, and it was possible to see the grayling take or refuse the fly. I spent hours at this spot just observing the fish, and offering them a new fly every once in a while.

Vaughan had just bought a second Hilleberg tent, and kindly let me borrow the other tent, so we had plenty of room.

I do not hesitate to advertise these tents, as they are pretty much perfect (except for the price). So a commercial link follows:
http://www.hilleberg.se

From the view west of the tentplace you can see that there's still snow on some of the higher mountains in the area.

Wildlife (including insects)

As for the more pleasant and interesting insects, there were mainly three insect types the fish seemed to be interested in.

The first one was a caddis species, which hatched during the darkest hours of the night. Remember that in these latitudes there's quite a bit of light even in the darkest hours, so fish are feeding actively, and we were fishing actively as well. Here are a couple of photos I took of the hatched insects in the daytime:

I remember reading one time about this killer fly in this area. It was a pupa imitation made of balsa wood, colored dark brown and yellow. The local fly-fishing guru told in the article that the fly works all around the summer, because the massive hatches seem to leave some sort of memory trace into the fish.

The second type of insect was a small size 20-24 gnat in the small lake we visited (more information on this visit below).

The third insect was some sort of a mayfly, which hatched in the days, and formed insect clouds during the evenings.

Which brings me to some other interesting creatures in the area. Because the mayflies had an interesting predator: the skua. When the mayflies were doing their mating dance in the air, skuas came flying above us to eat them. This is probably the best photograph I have taken ever.

But the most fascinating meeting with wildlife on this trip was to see how a polecat (fitch) hunts. During one evening I was making a new leader on the river bank. On the opposite side of the river there were two columns of rocks extending from the river bank into the river. Each column had 3-4 rocks. Suddenly a polecat jumped out of the brushwood, and jumped from rock to rock to the furthest rock in the column, turned around, hopped back to the brush, and repeated the maneuver for the second column of rocks. And all this happened in a matter of a couple of seconds. The damn thing was moving incredibly fast. Had there been a sea gull sitting on a rock it wouldn't have had a chance. Just incredible.

The fish and fishing

So there's practically only grayling. Because grayling eat mostly insects, they have few predators, so their population is large. Which is nice. And some of them fish are big too. Which is even nicer.

There were grayling all over the place, except for the shallowest parts of the river. When we arrived we first fished the areas near the tentplace, and caught a large number of 200-600 gr fish. But of course we wanted to find the bigger ones.

The bigger fish turned out to be in two places: in the large, slowly flowing pools between the more rapid runs, and in a nearby lake. It was possible to catch the fish in the pools during the days, but the pools were fairly wide, and finding the fish and casting at the spot wasn't all that easy. But during the nights the fish went for the hatching caddis. And then we had a ball.

There was a very good spot just below our tentplace. When the sun went down we headed down there. The fish were feeding very actively, they made splashes when they took the pupas which were swimming to the shore for hatching. Caddisflies were flying up from the grass on the riverbed. Remember that this happened at very low temperatures - at some nights there was only something like +2C if I remember correctly.

The first +1kg fish took an Elk Hair Caddis on the second night. The fish weighted 1150gr (length 51cm), and it's the biggest grayling I've ever caught. But the best fly in this place turned out to be the Streaking Caddis that Vaughan used. It fooled a large number of good sized fish. Vaughan retrieved it towards the riverbed, imitating the way in which the pupas were probably swimming to the shore.

During the first days we were fishing the river up and down from our camp, catching nice grayling, mostly with emerger imitations such as the Klinkhämer Special (a real killer fly, by the way).

On one day we bumped into a group of Swedes, who told us that there was a small lake with huge grayling nearby. So one morning we headed over there.

This turned out to be a good decision, because there were nice fish all over the place.

Catching the fish wasn't as easy, though. There were two ways to do this. The first (hard) way was to try to cast as far as possible and wait. The best fly for this turned out to be a #20 midge that Vaughan had. Anyway, you had to wait quite a while before a fish came swimming around your area. And even in that case the fish might swim further away from the shore than your fly was.

But the biggest fish of the whole trip was caught this way, although Vaughan extended the method a bit to achieve the desired end result. I wasn't around that time (I stayed on the river that day), but Vaughan told me that the fish had been too far out so that he could not reach them from the waterfront. So he took his pants off and waded further. Let me tell you that the water over there isn't too warm. But he was rewarded with a 55cm grayling, which was later estimated to have weighted 1500-1600gr, depending on whether it was a male or female (the fish was released). I think that's the biggest grayling Vaughan has ever caught. So we both broke our grayling records on this trip.

The second (easier) way to catch fish on the lake was to fish at a spot where a small river flowed out of the lake. This was an amazing experience, because when the sun was shining we could see the fish patrolling in the area, and take the fly. You can see this clearly in the following pictorials which, BTW, show the first fish in this whole story. (Some of the pictures are fairly large, but I wanted to retain the high resolution so that you can see the clearness of the water).

Jarmo Hurri

Vaughan Hurry