Tapani´s Timelapse Tests

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Tapani is the IQ guy in J&FF, no doubt about that.
He´s always coming up with new technical solutions for our setup, and a while ago, he installed the socalled Magic Lantern firmware on his Canon EOS 550D DSLR camera. Magic Lantern is a free, open source update which basically makes the camera able to do lots of cool stuff that Canon doesn´t want it to. Like record good audio, show live histograms and zebras, enable live audio monitoring, and many other things.
Tapani wasn´t quite happy with the audio solution they´d come up with, so he decided to give it a shot himself. So after a week or two of serious hacking, he was able to program a bypass around some chips here and there (don´t ask me how they do this stuff, it sounds like true magic to me). And now he has his name in the Magic Lantern “end credits” for doing something that made something better. Impressive! Go Tap!

Anyway, the Magic Lantern update also makes the camera able to shoot timelapses. Tapani did these timelapse tests in Finland some weeks ago. Enjoy (and be sure to check it out on Vimeo if you want the full HD experience)!

Sweet Summer

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I had a couple of great trips to one the fantastic rivers nearby Gothenburg last week. We had some moments of fantastic fishing on very tricky trout, and I even had my chanses on some sight fishing in shallow water. My lesson learned – never underestimate the eyes of the trout! It may not see you, but this time it was a slight movement on my rod tip that revealed me. Czech out my friend’s brand new trout tattoo! Tight lines!

 

Cows & Flies

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Another beautiful spring day above the arctic circle. This time, the weather was on my side, and I had a terrific day, catching several beautiful trout on the dry fly while communicating with the local cattle. Cows are much more intelligent than you might think! Czech it:

Catch ya later –

Håvard

Music: “Chanson de Fromage” by Jazz & Fly Fishing

How I became a flyfisherman

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Why did I start to fish at all? My parent’s never fished with rods, my dad just used to fish with nets every now and then at our summer cottage.

It was my uncle who introduced me to fishing. He bought me my first spinning rod and told me what lures to use. I got hooked, and me and my brother Tapani spent countless summer days and nights in the rowing boat, casting for pike and perch and trolling for trout in the lake Päijänne in Central Finland.

I got so obsessed about fishing that I spent all my weekly money on lures, rods and accessories. At the same time a friend of mine started talking to me about fly fishing. I realized I might get hooked on that too, and that was a big risk to take. Another fortune to spend. So I decided to keep fishing with my UL-rod. Rubber jigs were new at that time, and the perch were crazy about them. I was as happy as I could be.

Some time passed by, and my fly fishing friend showed me how to tie flies. I started tying flies on jig hooks. Some sort of woolly buggers, only with a heavy lead head, perfect to cast with a UL-spinning rod. And they were even more effective than the rubber jigs. So I became a fly tier. Soon the jig hooks were replaced by fly hooks, and I started tying “real” flies. My uncle had a fly rod that I borrowed. I tried to learn to cast, I read books about fly casting, failed, tried again, failed, never caught a fish, but I kept going. After a while I started bringing the fly rod with me to the fishing trips. We went to fish for trout, and I was used to fishing with my UL rod and the heavy woolly buggers. Very effective in the fast rapids, but there was something special and exciting with the fly rod! I took turns: UL rod – fly rod – UL rod – fly rod. And then I caught my first “real” fish with the fly rod. It was possible! Somehow the casting, tying flies, feeling the fish on the long fly rod, learning about insects and all that – it just turned my world upside down. There was no coming back.

So here I am, having spent another fortune on my fly fishing and fly tying gear. My old spinning rods and lures are still there in the cottage, the hooks are getting rusty and the lines are old and rotten. I guess I should freshen them up, at least for the guests’ sake who want to take a cast or two.

Now a friend of mine is trying to get me to fish salmn with him. No way. I’ve already promised myself not to become a salmon fisherman. Because I’ve heard that can be addictive…

2 Fast 2 Furious

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A huge storm was coming in from the North Atlantic, giving me just a few minutes to fish the calm before the storm.
Driven to a frenzy by the river´s feasting trout and further aggrevated by the sound of some guy drilling a hole for a flag pole outside his summer cottage, I experienced some severe strike problems. Somehow, I managed to cool down just before the storm hit the river and made fishing and filming impossible.

High Fives!

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The Nordic fly fishing blog scene is really happening at the moment. Cool new blogs are popping up all the time, supplying high quality fly fishing-related stuff to the starved masses.
These are some of our favourites:

The Swedish Nylinder brothers and their crew have a large collection of cool videos on their brand new site called Frontsidefly.com. These guys are really talented, and their films are always entertaining. Here is one of their latest videos:

Norwegian fly fishing legends Lars Nilssen and Lars Lenth have some serious fly fishing CVs. They´ve made a long series of TV shows, several films, and lots of fly fishing books and articles. In my opinion, their work in “Bård og Lars på fisketur” and the “Tørrfluelandet” series of films is the best fly fishing related entertainment to come out of the Nordic countries. Their latest project is the blog www.larsoglars.no and a new series of entertaining short films for VGTV (Norways´s biggest newspaper´s webTV-channel). I appear as a sidekick in some of the episodes. Czech it!
Here´s a trailer from their film Tørrfluelandet 3, which also features Andreas Fismen:

RIB is a Norwegian collective made up of young globetrotting flyfishermen. They don´t update their blog too often, but when they do, it´s always worth checking out. Creative writing and beautiful pictures. Recommended!
A picture:

Barbecue, RIB style

Finally, three guys from way up north in Norway started Utras.net last year. I was born and raised in Narvik, Northern Norway, and reading their blog always makes me homesick. The fishing around Oslo is ok, but up there it´s a totally different ballgame.
Like Lars&Lars and RIB, their blog is written in Norwegian, but you could always try with Google Translator (As you probably know, any text will end up really funny when it´s been run through Google Translator a couple of times). This video features some serious arctic char fishing:


High Fives, guys!

Season 2 – Ransarån – Of things to come

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The beauty...

One intense week of J&FF is now over and I’m back in Copenhagen. We started off with a nice three-day fishing trip to Ransarån in northern part of Sweden. Me, Håvard, Petzi (our producer) and Terje (a friend and an excellent Bass player) were back at the scene of crime from last year. (See blogs: 1, 2, 3)

I don’t have time to go too much into detail about what happened. I’ll just say that it was magical, and we of course filmed a lot of nice material for the blog and the Season 2. We’ll start going through the videos and pictures and hopefully I have time to make a quick edit for the blog about the high (and low) moments of our trip.

... and the Beast.