Where Is Trout? – Part II

On Easter Monday, inspired by Tapanis recent seatrout disaster, I decided to try some seatrout fishing myself. I figured I couldn´t do much worse. And I didn´t!
Since I spent this easter holiday in Narvik, way north of the arctic circle, my expectations were low. The fjord water is still really cold up there in April, so most seatrout will still be very close to freshwater.
However, I do have this special place where I´ve caught a couple of nice easter seatrout before.

The problem up north is a kind of luxury problem. The marine environment in many fjords is so rich that it can be really difficult to catch seatrout sometimes. Some fjords are just packed with other species of fish, like pollock, haddock, misc. flatfish, catfish, coalfish and cod. And the problem when you´re fishing for seatrout is always the coalfish, or småsei, as we say in Norwegian. The seatrout might be there, and it might want to take the fly, but it just isn´t going to happen when the seatrout is outnumbered a million to one by the small to medium-sized coalfish (I´m not even exaggerating. Go see for yourself).

Now,
I don´t want you to get the wrong idea. I´m not a fascist. The coalfish is a nice, streamlined creature, it makes tremendous eating, and the larger ones fight really fiercely. It´s just not what I was hunting for, that´s all. And there´s very little sport in fishing for it when there´s literally millions of them around. It´s just too easy.

After trying to avoid the coalfish without success for a couple of hours, I decided to see if I could catch ten fish on ten casts as a “grand finale”. I asked my friend Roger (who took some of these photos) if he thought I could do it. He said “Yes”. I caught ten coalfish in ten casts, we packed up and left.

Where is trout?

2 Comments

Glenn

hey, you should also try evening at 8 to 9 tia, the trout are wild then, preferably a couple of hours before low water. The biggest problem is that coal-fish come up from the depths.

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