Now’s the time for the annual Gothenburg International Film Festival! The intense eleven days will see the screening of 429 films from 80 countries, more than 40 seminars as well as parties, clubs, music, food and exhibitions. The Grande Finale, the ending party is on Saturday Febryary 4th at a hip club called Yaki-Da. It’s going to be a huge and a beautiful evening of music and friends, as well as hipsters in the international film industry. Did I mention that Jazz & Fly Fishing is performing there?
The doors open for the public at 23.00, and the live jazz starts on the top floor with the Swedish jazz singer Maria Rylander’s band. We’re on stage right after midnight. The club will be crowded with lots of film festival VIPs but you can get a ticket at the door for 140 SEK. Or you can mail us (info (a) jazzandflyfishing.com) and we’ll put you on the guest list!
Yaki-Da has really great food and drinks, and we really really want all you J&FF friends there. Just make sure you arrive before 23.00 because it will be PACKED from 23.00-04.00!!!
One of our favorite online fishing magazines, Blood Knot Magazine, has released their 2nd annual Blogger Issue. This mag is packed with feature articles and fantastic photos from around the world. Excellent winter reading! We are also proud to be contributing writers on this one. Enjoy!
A short edit from our tour in Poland, September 2011
Music: Jazz & Fly Fishing
Thanks: Ranjit Prasad at Saraswati Studios, Igor Glinda at Tartak Fly Fishing Centre, Kuba Standera at Sztuka Lowienia, Peter, Thomas, and all the other beautiful people that helped us out and made our stay in Poland so memorable.
We´re coming back, guys!
Special thanks to Roli Mosimann for supplying the title of the video and for sharing his philosphy of life with us.
A "Good Sized" Siberian Taimen taken on a fly by Mikhail Skopets
Russia´s far east has always fascinated me. The vastness and remoteness of this enormous area makes Scandinavia´s deepest wilderness seem like an urban park.
And there is fish there, too: lots of weird and beautiful salmonid species, many of them unique to the area, as well as other interesting species. And there is very little real intel to be found online.
I stumbled upon this exciting website called Fly Fishing Russia the other day, and I thought I´d share it with you. The blog is run by fish biologist/flyfisherman Mikhail Skopets, and deals with, well, fly fishing in Russia. Highly recommended – check it out!
The above image shows Mikhail Skopets with what he refers to as a “good sized” Siberian Taimen – a fat 137 cm specimen. This kinda makes me wonder what he would consider a “big” taimen…
If you fish in areas that holds a lot of wild fish it doesn´t harm to every now and then keep one fellow. When that happens, this recipe can be a good choice! If you have a lot of energy you can bake twisted baguettes at the same time. If you have even more energy, you can (the day before) make you own aioli and serve with the soup. If you still have energy left, give Håvard a call!
I actually haven’t had the time to take any good pics when making the soup since I´m then in the middle of soup-making-action. Lets take it from the top. This is what you need:
Fish soup is a quite easy dish to cook. It doesn´t take to long time, it is not very expensive and it is very tasty. There is basically only one thing you must avoid in order to make it taste good. Most of you out there probably already know what I’m talking about. This is what I’m talking about… ok, here it comes; whatever you do, do not boil the fish. Some chefs claim that fish is not supposed to get warmer than 58 degrees…
There are thousands of recipes of different kinds of fish soups, this is just my version. You can of course add or remove ingredients and create your own favorite.
Recipe, 4 – 6 persons (Before you do anything else, turn on a nice record and prepare and chop the ingredients)
Step 1
Butter, about 20 gram
Olive oil, some oil
Heat up the fat in a large pan, lets say medium heat
Step 2
Red onion, a half
Onion, a half
About 100g Leek,
Two Celery Sticks, one chopped finely chopped and added early, the other one in bigger chunks and added at step 4
Chili, not too much
Garlic, 1 – 3 cloves
One Potato, chop it as you feel
Add the stuff above and let it sweat for a while, not get brownish… this takes about 5 – 10 minutes.
Step 3
Tomato, one
Tomato puree, two spoons
Let the tomatoes run around for about 5 minutes before you add the broth
Step 4
Broth (+ water), 15 dl If possible, make your own
White wine, 2 – 3 dl depending on what kind of whine, taste and see!
One Carrot, Chop it as you feel
One Fennel, roughly chopped
Shell from lemon, more than you think but not the whole fruit, taste and decide
White pepper, some
Thyme, some dried and if you have; some fresh thyme as garnish
Celery, the big rest of it
Bay leaf, two – four
Curry, very little curry, less than you think, the soup is not supposed to taste curry
Let this boil on medium/low heat for about 15 – 20 minutes. Meanwhile – taste and add salt if you need. Since the fish holds no salt, the soup can be a little tiny bit too salt before you add the fish.
Step 5
Mushrooms (champignon), If they are small, don’t cut them. If big – big chunks! Wait a couple of minutes…
Step 6
Fish, about 400 – 800 gram bone free filet, cut in quite big chunks. Perch, char, pike, salmon… or just cod, what you can get that’s not caught on the other side of the world
Lower the heat and add the fish, make sure it doesn’t boil!
Step 7
Add (if you have) fresh thyme ring the food bell! /F
This spectacular video was brought to my attention by the great Swedish photographer and flyfisherman Knotan.
Be sure check out Knotan´s site, and enjoy the video!
As a longtime friend of Fredrik – the creative genius, drummer and flyfisherman of J&FF – I know that the subject of food is of utter importance. Whereas most people have probably been through the following stages, I will use Fredrik as an example, partly because he’s a nice guy that loves eating, and also because I have some photos for illustration.
1. Bring it to the max!
Before a long hike you should eat well to keep the body going for hours with a heavy back pack and a demanding terrain. Family pizza for instance. There’s no need to save on weight, fat or carbohydrates (but Fredrik is always whining about the price of the Norwegian food).
One man, one pizza
2. In-field cooking
Now this is a form of art. On a long trip the meals have to be planned so that there’s: a) enough food, b) not too much food to carry and c) tasty and varied food that is possible to prepare with very simple equipment (this is the most difficult one). Fredrik is a true master of making in-field gourmet dinners. We’ve had some of our lives’ best three-course meals in a tent in the middle of the Scandinavian tundra, prepared by Freddy the master chef. However, planning the amount of food can go wrong. Too much food and you end up competing who can make the longes “squeeze” out of a tube of soft cheese by jumping on it. Too little food and you realize it’s two slices of bread a day for the rest of the trip. Believe me, both have happened us.
You can never get enough coffee on rainy days
Preparing dessert
Pancakes!
It doesn't get better than this!
3. Emergency situations
These photos illustrate some of Fredrik’s methods for surviving the extreme situations that may occur when you fish too much and eat too little. The recipes are in the photo titles.
Winter is not fun. Sure, it has its moments: I like skiing, both downhill and cross country, but the Nordic winters are so long it´s ridiculous. Some people have more sense than others, and head for the southern hemisphere. Spending February in New Zealand doesn´t sound too shabby, but alas, that´s not gonna happen this winter. Well, at least the days are getting longer, and in a few months´ time, the fish will be rising again (however unlikeliy that might seem right now). Till then, we´ll just have to cope somehow.
These pictures are from one of last summer´s better days. One early Narvik morning in late June, I packed all my gear into my mother´s -98 VW Polo and drove flat out towards one of the better road-near rivers on Nordkalotten. On the way, I hooked up with Harstad homeboy Erlend Welde, co-founding father of Utras.net, easily one of the better Scandinavian fly fishing blogs at the moment.
It turned out to be a really tricky day on the river. Late June is still early in the season on this particular water, and the river ran very high and very cold. Sparse hatches of small BWO mayflies and the occasional feathermidge didn´t seem to impress the river´s spoiled brown trout and arctic char, so when local fly fishing legend Alf M. Sollund (check out his Flickr here, lots of great shots) called Erlend and suggested a coffee break, it seemed like a really good idea.
The coffee was perfect, but one hour later, the river was still completely non-happening. Alf decided to have a go from his kayak. Fortunately, Erlend knows this river a lot better than me, and had an ace up his sleeve: A slow flowing, shallow and wide part of the river which can sometimes be good when the water is high and cold. And it was. Good, I mean. Not really good, but at least OK – a quite decent BWO hatch made some quite decent fish rise quite frequently. Erlend won the lottery, and made the first cast on the best looking fish. A couple of minutes later, a decent arctic char was brought to the net. The fishing that followed was not that bad. A few small-to-medium-sized fish were kind of interested in feeding from the surface, and took our flies with moderate enthusiasm. And then the wind and rain came. The End.
Just as we left the spot, Erlend got another call from an Alf, who spoke with speaker-cracking intensity. Paddling around in his kayak, he had spotted a serious brown trout, estimated around 4-5 kgs. It almost took his fly. However, he had somehow managed to convince a 2,2 kg trout to take his nymph. An incredible catch on such a slow day. Erlend and I went to the local burger joint.
After dinner, we searched all over the place for active fish. One top secret spot after another, all stone dead. Around half past nine in the evening, we met Alf again as he was getting ready to leave. After those two big trout, he hadn´t seen anything at all, despite covering miles and miles of river in his kayak. Erlend mumbled something about a pregnant wife waiting at home. We decided to have one more look at a certain stretch of the river and then call it a day.
The first thing we saw as we peeked through the dense vegetation was a big, juicy mayfly sailing like a schooner down the river. And then we saw another one. And another one. Pretty soon it was a proper armada. 2011´s first Ephemerella Aurivillii hatch was on – and it started after ten o´clock in the evening! Nature is gloriously uncivilized and unpredictable up there (and so are the people, by the way). It just doesn´t behave like it´s supposed to – maybe because of the perpetual daylight – who knows. And who cares? The trout certainly didn´t care, and wasted no time. A long row of feasting trout lined up in the seam of the current, close to the steep bank. The trout, many of them big, rose steadily, gulping down most of the mayflies that floated helplessly over their heads. And we were the only fishermen there.
One and a half hour later, we were back in the car. Although it was still as light as the day, it was midnight, and the hatch was over. At least that´s what we told ourselves – we had to leave anyway. Ninenty minutes of pure, exhilarating magic, filled with the very essence of the sport: magnificent, wild fish rising steadily to large mayflies. Nirvana for a flyfisherman.
2012 it is! Several storms have passed over Sweden the last couple of months and the days are short. In the area around Gothenburg, the weather has been very gray and wet. Very boring simply said. Yesterday Joona and me went on the first fishing trip of the year and we actually had great luck with the weather. It was a cold, beautiful day and the fishing was surprisingly good! And the sun was shining again; I almost forgot that it was possible!
Since the water is around 1 degree (celsius), the trout swims close to the bottom where the water is warmer. We used sinking lines and floating nymphs and that really worked. I got a fish that looked like a football; 48.5 cm long and a weight of 2 kg. Joona got the most beautiful fish. 2012 has started…
With 2012 on the doorstep, here are some of the highs (and lows) of 2011, seen through various camera lenses:
Last christmas, Tapani and Joona decided to saw a big hole in the ice of the lake outside their cottage in central Finland. Then they did some really strange: First they sat for hours in the ridiculously hot torture chamber they call sauna, and then they went swimming in the whole in the ice. Go figure.
In January, we met up in Gothenburg for a planning/rehearsal session. Fredrik had caught some nice perch icefishing on the frozen Göta Älv, and prepared a delicous perch soup for us. There was also some wine and 78-records involved:
In february, we released our debut album, Slow Walking Water. It recieved excellent reviews from the critics. You can buy it here! We played a release concert at Parken in Gothenburg, and our friend Damien made this excellent video from the show:
Winter is a good time for editing videos, and in March, Tapani finished the edit of the second part of our 2010 Sight Fishing adventures. One of our very best web videos, if you ask me:
April started with a quite successful April Fool´s Day hoax. And a few days later, during our Season 2 sea trout sessions around Gothenburg in early April, Joona made this short horror video with his iPhone 4 and the 8mm app. It captures the true essence of spring seatrout fishing in an excellent way:
In mid-April, Joona, Tapani and Fredrik went to the Fishing fair in Jönköping, tried to sell jazz CDs to fishermen, and filmed the whole thing. They also asked a lot of fishermen the quintessential question: “What is your biggest fish?”
Later in April, I went to a splitcane gathering hosted by Oslo fly fisher´s Association. It was a true joy to cast rods from such masterful builders as Vidar Steimler, Geir Rud and Sigfred Mittet. Click here to see the post – lots of pics of happy people experiencing the joy of casting with a modern splitcane rod.
In May, a really cool article by Fredrik was published in the Norwegian magazine Fluefiske 2011, and we publised some left-over video material from 2010 – one video with a really nice trout, and one with a serious monkey wrench:
Joona had a great trip to the beautiful Säveån, Tapani did some nice timelapse tests, Fredrik went fishing in Northern Sweden´s Vindelfjällen with some friends and came home with some really good photos, and I squeezed out two videos, one were I went halibut fishing in the midnight sun with some friends and ended up catching some serious cod, and one that explores the link between cows and flies:
June ended with Joona and Fredrik catching some serious sea trout outside Gothenburg (so it is possible, after all).
Early July: our album debut Slow Walking Water was chosen album of the week in Euro Jazz radio, and we launched our first Shadow Cast Competition:
The rest of the month was filled with exciting fishing trips, including a serious J&FF expedition up north, and there wasn´t too much happening on the blog.
I went fishing up north, and came across two very different trout, one that was totally apathic, and one that was more than willing to dance:
In September, we went touring in France and Poland. We had the best time ever, met lots of really cool people and got huge amounts of material for our ongoing film project, Season 2. The area around San River in southeastern Poland was particularily beautiful.
Back home in Norway, Lars Nilssen from the Norwegian blog larsoglars.no and I travelled to Savalen, Norway to watch the arctic char spawn. Some incredible sights!
Joona delivered another iPhone 4/8mm app video, this time featuring Fredrik performing his spontaneus Shadow Cast composition “”The Man I Want to Be”:
In November, I did a little story about the mysterious Bibio Pomonae, an insect that appears out of nowhere in biblical amounts and makes the trout to go completely mental. A few days later, I caught several huge rainbow trout a couple of hundreds meters from my appartement in central Oslo.
As you might know, we´re currently working on a new film project, working title Season 2. Tapani made this edit from the first material we shot during winter and early spring 2012. The new film is up for release in February 2013:
This Is Fly is a really cool publication that brings an alternative perpective on fly fishing. I did an article about us for the December/January issue (#32).
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