Fishing - Fly Fishing in Sweden, Part 2: The Inauspicious Day

Steve Goodman has a song that contains the line: “If life were on
videotape, everything would be okay. You could see trouble coming, and
you could step out of the way.” Today would have been one of those
days that a fast-forward button would have come in handy…several
times. I suppose we should have seen it coming; all the signs were
there. It started right after midnight last night; technically ‘today’
by most standards.

I had been spin-casting for some Northern Pike that live in some
slackwater right off the dock in Roger’s back yard. I have always
enjoyed casting for these guys, pickerel too; mostly because of their
fierce look and the short, but intense fight they put up.

I also remember the first time I was aware that ‘serious fishermen’
tend to scoff at catching them, and consider them more of a nuisance
fish than anything. I was bass fishing with my dad and an old family
friend of his named Don, in Montana. There was a back eddy with some
dense weeds, and the pike were abundant and large in there. Dad had
this magical pike lure…it looked like a piece of metal bent in half
with the hook at the bend, and it buzzed like crazy when you retrieved
it at the right speed. It was a pike magnet…they could not avoid it
and I was hauling in a thrashing toothy ******* with every cast. Of
course, getting them off the line was another entire adventure, but I
have never forgotten how dad and Don rolled their eyes and went off
for better game when I got into the pike, but I stayed and cast for
hours until the biggest baddest one swallowed the lure and I had to
kill it to get the lure back. I still have a picture of me grinning
from ear to ear, holding up this huge fish more than three feet long.
What the picture doesn’t show is the peanut gallery of disparaging
comments coming from Dad and Don in the background as they took the
picture.

So it was with no small amount of historical synchronicity that I was
casting to big pike at Roger’s with him making similar disparaging
remarks in the background. Nonetheless, I was enjoying myself and had
a big floating frog and black steel leader on a spinning rig,
retrieving it with short splashy pulses as Roger and I bantered. Then,
suddenly, right in midsentence, a big daddy pike slammed my lure. It
wasn’t the 15-pounder that had dragged out my line, leapt clear and
spit out the frog a few days earlier, but this was still a 10-pound
fish, thrashing and foaming at my feet. I had him totally set and
could see the lure deep in his gullet…he wasn’t spitting out anything.
I laughed and commented “Geeze, I don’t even have my long handled
forceps….what am I going to do with this thing now that I have it?”
and at that instant the pike ran, I raised my rod tip, and the 40-
pound test spiderline broke! The pike escaped, taking the new lure and
steel leader. Both Roger and I were dumbfounded...I have never had
spiderline break like this. We looked at the frayed end and commented
that it just wasn’t meant to happen…maybe the stars were wrong or
something.

Little did we suspect how the stars were misaligned that day as I
headed off up the road to my cabin for a few hours rest.

A few hours later, I woke up and went down to Roger’s cabin for
coffee. We had decided to fish a pond nearby that was filled with huge
trout of a unique species that had inhabited this one pond for
thousands of years. We loaded up our gear and drove the twisty woods
roads to the pond, rigged up, and worked our way through the shaggy
forest to the edge of the pond.

A week earlier, I had done a road trip across Sweden into the central
coast of Norway to see the fjords and other sights. Along the drive, I
had plenty of time to think about my last road trip through
Scandinavia, nine years ago when I was just beginning to learn to
flyfish. I had one particularly strong memory of driving past a pond
in northern Norway and seeing fish rising everywhere….literally
hundreds of rises all across the top of this little quarter-acre pond
with fish leaping entirely clear of the surface at times. Being of
extremely limited skill and even more limited experience, I found
myself trying vainly to cast to these fish, with no idea of what fly
to use (I still hadn’t even gotten my brain around the idea that there
were ‘dries’, ‘nymphs’, ‘streamers’ and ‘terrestrials’) let alone how
to deliver it gently. I could not cast more than 10 feet out, and
always with a splashy dump and a tangled pile of line, so I ended up
tying on some sort of completely ineffective huge fly, stripping out a
ton of line, and trying futilely to get a small feeder stream to drag
my fly out to where the fish were jumping before the fly saturated and
sank. I was, of course, getting no takes. At one point, to really add
insult to inefficiency, a fat fish actually leapt completely over the
fly. It was truly humiliating.

Needless to say, I had learned a lot since then, and one purpose of
this summer’s trip was to find opportunities to redeem myself and
measure up my skills in similar situations. So when I reached the
crest of the mountain pass between Sweden and Norway and passed a
quarter acre pond with fish rising everywhere, it was a simple
decision to pull over and string up my rod.

Out near the center of the pond one particularly large, splashy rise
kept reoccurring. Some resident monster was feeding in a spot where it
was difficult to reach him; however there was a small island near his
zone where a fisherman could easily get a line out to his feeding spot
if they could get on to the island. The island was connected to the
shore by a dense, marshy patch of moss. As I approached the moss
patch, I could feel the ground beneath my feet bouncing a bit like a
trampoline, and I was unsure of whether it was that the moss was just
supersaturated with water like a sponge, or if it was a floating mat
and I would run the risk of actually punching through to god-knows-
what beneath. Standing there at the edge of the firm terrain, testing
the moss ahead of me with ginger, bouncing steps was a very
disquieting experience. I could not tell what the substrate was like,
and in the end I chickened out and decided not to try to walk the 10
feet across it. I did end up catching a few nice fat smaller browns to
redeem my earlier experience, but I never got a clean cast at the big
fish, and later I drove down the road with an uncomfortable feeling
that I had missed a great opportunity, and maybe it would have been
perfectly safe to walk out to the island across the moss.

Anyway, when Roger and I approached the trout pond on the Inauspicious
Day, there was a similar mossy patch along the shore. Roger was ahead
of me, standing on the patch and gazing across the water. I hesitated,
and then gingerly walked out to where he was. “I hate this stuff,” I
commented, “I can’t tell if it's a floating mat of moss or if it’s
just saturated with water.”

“This?” Roger said, bouncing up and down a little. “This is a floating
mass. There’s open water beneath. If you work you feet up and down in
one spot like this” he demonstrated, “you can work your way right
through it. You have to be careful.”

I felt a bit better about not having waded out on the moss patch in
Norway, but I asked “How deep would you sink? Is it open beneath, or a
bunch of roots, or what?”

“Oh, its probably 2-3 meters deep here. If you dropped through this,
you’d have to swim out from under it…you’d be in real trouble. No
fun.”

I was feeling much better about my decision in Norway. Roger said,
“Let’s head around the edge of this pond and fish. Walk carefully,
now.” And he gingerly walked off.

He needn’t have said anything. I took one frigging step, and the
ground beneath me just disappeared and I dropped right through the
moss up to my armpits. I instinctively threw my arms out and fell
forward, but the moss closed up around me and my feet were hanging
beneath me in open water with nothing to push against. It was the
closest feeling I could imagine to going through the ice or falling in
quicksand. If my waders had been two inches shorter, I would have
taken on water; as it was I was in right up to my arms. I yelped, and
Roger quickly worked his way back out to me along a fallen log, took
my rod, grabbed my outstretched arm and with a combination of his
pulling and my twisting and squirming to break the suction, I finally
was extricated and able to get out of the mossy patch. Other than a
real scare (yeah, I don't mind admitting that it was freaking
terrifying!) and having gotten slimy, stinky marsh gunk all over me,
my waders, my fishing vest and my gear, I was unharmed. The only
damage was a broken sling that carries my spools of tippet, and I
ended up losing my nerve for wading for several hours. Even just
stepping into a muddy bottom, I had fears of the ground opening up and
swallowing me, and my disappearing beneath the water. It was extremely
disquieting. In a short while, Roger and I decided that it might be
best to quit fishing that pond, go have dinner, and go casting for
salmon later that night in the Byske River at a secret spot that he
knew. We probably should have quit when we were ahead.

Dinner was going to be pasta with a special seafood sauce that Roger
makes. I was lying on the couch upstairs above the kitchen, smelling
the delicious smells emanating while Roger was cooking. A few days
earlier I had experimented with some of the more ‘challenging’ Swedish
food, and had tasted a dish called 'Surstromming' that consisted of
fermented fish in an extremely rancid-smelling sauce. It smelled and
tasted a bit like kerosene, and you have to actually open the can
underwater to avoid gagging on the smell. Strangely enough, the taste
is weirdly satisfying, although I think the first person to venture to
eat it should have been given an award for bravery, or stupidity, or
both. They probably avoided starving to death, which is more than I
can say for any of us who eat it nowadays.

In any case, as the warm smells of Roger’s cooking were wafting around
the cabin, a strange smell started permeating the air. “Smells like
someone opened a can of that rancid fish” I stated, and Roger said, “I
dunno. I just added a can of salted crawdad tails, and they really
stink. I ate one, and they taste okay, but I’m considering tossing out
the food I’ve prepared because that smell doesn’t seem right. What do
you think?” “Well”, I said, “'better safe than sorry' I say,
especially with shellfish. I’d be a bit concerned about eating
something that smelled like that myself….wait, you said you ATE one??
Man, you might be pretty sick in the next day or so…” “Yeah, I thought
of that afterwards” said Roger as he dumped the dinner into the
garbage bin.

Anyway, while Roger’s grandmother cooked us up a feast of minced
moosemeat and mushroom sauce, Roger spent most of the meal looking a
bit worried and edgy. He said that, if he was going to get sick later,
he didn’t want much in his stomach beforehand. We’re still waiting to
see if his sampling of the crawdad will have any adverse effect, but a
few hours later, we rigged up with spey rods and drove down to the
river anyway.

We had fished this stretch a few days earlier, but it had been my
first experience spey casting and while Roger was easily tossing out
70 feet of line and more, I was thrashing the surface and flinching as
the treble-hooked salmon fly went whizzing past my head with every
cast. On this evening, the evening of the Inauspicious Day, my casts
were a lot better and I was enjoying myself much more. I even had a
strange confident feeling that we were going to catch a salmon that
evening, as the weather had been perfect for several days and reports
were that record numbers of fish had moved upstream in the past few
days. So it was with little surprise that after about an hour of
casting, Roger let out a ‘Whooop!’ and I looked over to see his rod
bent double and him leaning back. I quickly started retrieving my own
line to clear the way for him to play his fish, and he yelled ‘Look at
THAT!’ Way downstream, 100 yards or so, a flash of silver leapt clear
of the water. My first thought was ‘Wow! How did he cast that far?’
and it was immediately followed by the realization that this fish had
taken his fly and streaked off downstream, running out 40 meters of
shooting head and 50 meters of running line, in about 3 seconds! This
was one fierce fish!

Suddenly Roger almost fell over backwards, and yelled “Oh NO!!” His
rod went slack, and he threw up his arms in frustration. “It got
OFF!!” But then he started reeling in his line, and shouted even more
when he realized that his running line had slipped free of the nail
knot connecting it to his backing! Even worse than breaking off or
spitting out the hook, the fish had taken his fly, tippet, shooting
head and running line….about $150 worth of hardware. With this in
addition to the massive frustration of losing a great salmon, he
understandably threw a mini tantrum, smacking the water with his rod
and swearing, since without half his rig, fishing for him was over for
the night.

Meanwhile, I said, “Damn, that’s a real drag!” and flicked my rod tip
to cast out my own line. Suddenly, at that moment, BAM!! it felt like
I had been shot in the hand with a shotgun. I looked down to see that
the treble-hooked fly embedded into my right ring finger, at the
knuckle below my fingernail, right up to the bend in the hook. I
stared in disbelief. “Oh ****! I just HOOKED MYSELF BAD!” I shouted to
Roger, who was still kicking the water and yelling at nothing and
everything. “Yeah, I saw” he said, “your line whipped off the branch
behind you.”

I stared at the hook immersed in my finger, and felt my hand throbbing
on the edge of numbness. These spey casts whip the fly around at an
incredible speed, well over 100 mph, and in addition to the pain of
having a hook sunk into my finger, the fly slamming into my hand was
like having my knuckles rapped by a Mack truck. My hand HURT! I
gingerly tried to pull the hook back out, but it was so embedded that
I could not even make it twist in place. I felt my stomach churn.

“Ummm, Roger…I’m going to need some help getting this thing out. Its
really in there…” I said. He said, “Yeah, well, snip off the line and
we’ll go home and push it through.”

“I tried to push it a bit through myself just now, and it won’t budge.
Um, I think it’s in the bone. It’s not going anywhere.”

“Well, we’ll just ice your finger and cut it out then. DAMN, that was
one big fish!”

I figured there was no way I was going to let him go slicing my finger
open while he was bemoaning his lost salmon and fishing line, so I bit
off the tippet, reeled in the line, and we walked the half mile back
through the woods to the car while I carefully protected my finger
with the salmon fly dangling out of it. When we got back to the car,
and while Roger stomped around a bit more about his lost salmon, I put
a loop of line around the bend of the hook, pressed down on the shaft,
and gave an extremely solid, steady pull. After a couple of seconds,
and with an audible popping sound, to my immense relief the hook
jerked out.

I looked at my watch and it was 5 minutes past midnight. The
Inauspicious Day was finally over. One broken spiderline, one lost
pike (along with a new fly and steel leader), one drop through the
moss, one broken tippet holder, one poisoned crawdad, one ruined
dinner, one lost salmon, lost shooting head, lost running line, lost
tippet and fly, and one deeply embedded treble hook.

Yow, where was the fast forward button when we needed it?