The Rena river is one of the legendary rivers in Norway when it comes to big Grayling and Trout, I have never been there before so last weekend, before the season stops, I rented a car and headed out. it is a 200km trip north of Oslo, so I started out at 7am on a sunday morning to get the most of the day. I had rented a room at renafiskecamp.no and stopped by there to get a fishing permit and some tips on where to start.

The river is a barbless only river, and with a bag limit and restrictions on size as well, it has grown to be that legendary place where you can get good sized fish. The fly-only zone is about 4km long and I stayed in this the most of the time. But first: get some coffee and sit down and watch the river for a while:

The river is of a kind that I haven’t fished much before: it is broad, got some good currents and it has vegetation right next to the river. This means you need to do snakeroll to spey and variants of this to get the line out. This is something I haven’t done much, so I ended up getting a lot of practice (and in fact spent a fair amount of time doing this at points where I didn’t spot any fish and was about to move from a spot). The first day I got a tiny grayling and cast on 3 fish that was up on my fly but didn’t hook properly, in addition I saw the biggest trout in my life: just 15m downstream a 2kg+ brown jumped clean off the water and showed me its broadside, and it was wide!

The second day I started out on a different stretch, but the instance I arrived at the river it started pouring down…..

So I settled in underneath a tree and got myself some coffee, and waited, and waited…..

A bit later on the day and I relocated a bit upstream and the same thing happened again: the weather cleared up, but then it started pouring down again….. No fish rose, no hatch and not very pleasant weather at all. In the end I set on a small wetfly and cast out, 3 meters into the wetfly swing I hooked this grayling: 1005 gram, and finally above the 1kg mark! A beautiful fish that now is swimming happily in Rena.

I relocated a bit north-east to Isteren to fish some there on a stretch that is known for big grayling.

But: there were 30 ducks feeding in the river, something I also noticed in Rena. So no fish here and I almost hooked a duck coming up after a dive.

Moved quickly down to Galthovudet to see if there could be something, but there were more ducks and no fish besides a couple of small trout that hit my fly constantly.