I have been waiting for a Golden Plover skin for a very long time, but this week it finally arrived! The color and pattern on the head/neck of this bird really lends itself to a spider pattern as this.
The small spiders and flymphs will get a section in the flybox this year for more active fishing.
Spent some time over the weekend to tie up some seatrout patterns. The shrimp patterns are new for me, I just got a whiting spey salmon neck the other day, so I’m looking forward to testing that out.
And: follow this space for some interesting news in the next week or so……
Pattegrisen:
Shrimp:
Vaskebjørn:
Rusty Magnus:
Polar Magnus:
Holo Loppa:
Rabbit Kutling:
Thread: UNI 6/0 White
Tag: Veevus French tinsel, UNI-Floss yellow
Tail: GP
Body: Black Sealsfur dubbing
Rib: Veevus French tinsel
Wing: Yellow/Red-brown/Black Fox, Angel Hair rainbow
Hackle: Keough Hen Saddle Blue
Sides: JC
Cone: Black
Was inspired from a picture on facebook to do this one. I have a lot of BC on hook and tube from earlier, but a longer variant like this was not there! Tried to tie in the wing as sparsely as possible to get that long flowing feel of it in the water.
It’s autumn again and we are already far into October, but these days can give some crystal clear days when everything is perfect to go out fishing. It has been a busy autumn for my part with traveling and work, so not so many trips out to fish in the Oslo fjord. But I started on a new job last wednesday, and with that I had some vacation days before leaving my old job so I I tied up some seatrout flies and the weather went into picture-perfect mode for two days!
If you have read this blog before you will see that this is a place I have visited before, and that is true, this place is easy accessible, you need waders to get out there and along the shore you can strike gold on a good day. I tie up a lot of flies for my box, and part of going out like this is also to get the new flies into the water to see how they behave. Even if people say that this and that fly is best I like to see how they react and behave before I make up my mind about them (and go back to make adjustments). Here is the lipstick shrimp variation I tied up the other day, I want to get a little bit of lead in the front part to get it to walk a bit different, but that will be for the next trip out here.
So I had some food, rigged up my Guideline LPXe #6 and started fishing along the shore, it didn’t take more than 3 casts before a cod followed all the way up to the shore and nibbled the shrimp, but it turned aournd just 1 meter out, a close encounter! I quickly realized that a big flock of small bait fish went back and forth along the shore, and with it came the hunting fish. I tied up a rusty magnus and started casting in and just outside the big flock to see if something would hit it, but I only got two-three nibbles. So I sat down and paused a bit, these days are good for just sitting down to relax and look at the sea. I kept the rusty magnus on and threw out again, and at one point a fish came up a meter behind my fly, I could see the fin, and it aggressively attacked the fly, but did not take…
Not the best picture, but this is how it looked when the flock came along the shore:
The seatrout was very jumpy (quite literally) this day: several times I saw seatrout jumping up, one cleared the watesrwith 50cm+,. They also hunted the baitfish all the way in to the shore: you would see a couple of small rings in the surface, then suddenly hundred of small fish would rush in the surface past you, making a wooshing sound as it went past, and you saw the fish hunting them, all the way in to shore and a couple of the small fish went ashore! Then it went silent…. until it happened again 30 minutes later.
The evenings was great though: had picture-perfect conditions for fishing, but sat down and looked at this view quite a few times.
Not the worst of places to be a monday evening!
At one point a huge rushing sound came right above me and a huge flock of crows was flying past me, I have never had a “The Birds” moment like this before, I got the camera up a bit too late to get a good picture, but if you click on this one an see all the black dots above the building: birds! (and there was even more to the right of the picture)
Even though the seatrout was out and around it didn’t want to hook properly this time, but I did catch a couple of this with the spaykutling that I have made a set of.
The Big Hole Demon got a chance to swim as well, but didn’t get any hits. This one I need to varnish or layer with bugbond on the body so that it keeps longer.
The second-to-last throw and I got this one (also on a spaykutling), It has been a long time since I’ve seen such a fat/round fish! It must have been full of small fish that it had been hunting along the shore.
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.
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