Season is over


For most in the Northern Hemisphere winter is either here or fast approaching. This doesn’t mean that fishing is over, but I believe that most of us fish a little less and some not at all, perhaps depending on how diverse you are in your fishing. Here in Scandinavia, lots of fly fishers fish for several different species. In the salt, early winter is actually a very good time to chase for one of the elusive, chrome sea trout that skip the spawning run. Pike are also in season and are hungry, busy feeding and getting ready for the slow winter months and cold water.

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Nymphs for carp?


The variety in fly fishing is enormous, and almost all species of fish can be trigged in one way or another with a fly fished on a fly rod. The traditional trout and salmon fishing are familiar to everyone, but out there beneath the surface a lot of other exciting species await – and they also like to take an enticing fly. This week we talked to the English fly tyer and fly fisherman Jamie Sandford about one of his newer favourite fish, the “bonefish of fresh water” – the carp.

Here Jamie himself tells about the exciting fishing for the carp.

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Beast Fleye

Bob Popovics and Steve Silverio at the IFTS 2023.

Last weekend, Morten and Steve Silverio were at the International Fly Tying Symposium in Somerset, NJ. We were in place on Hareline’s stand and we want to say thank you to everyone who came by and said hi.

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Ismo Pupa

Caddis are important prey for trout and grayling. Some species leave their pupal case and swim towards the surface. Here they swim towards shore to hatch on land or in vegetation. They’re fairly big and you can easily see them almost rowing along the surface. This behaviour obviously makes them highly exposed to trout and grayling, but also very fun to fish, because you can skate and twitch the fly, which often triggers quite aggressive strikes. Skating and twitching is often something we strive to avoid when dry fly fishing, but in this case, it’s exactly the way to fish.

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New sizes, autumn and shrimps


We’ve added a few new sizes to our SA 250 Shrimp hooks. The SA 250 maybe be called “Shrimp” and it’s designed specifically for that and it is indeed excellent for tying shrimps, more on that below. t’s one of those hooks that has a name that does imply a very specific usage, but is really more versatile than that.

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Bending? No more – the SA 258/PR 358 CA Bendback is here


We’re pleased to, once again, announce the official release of a new hook. We love making hooks, and in particular ones that are made for specific purposes, maybe even a model others would call a niche product. It only makes it better when they are a result of a collaboration with others. In this instance the hook is a result working with Chris Adams (from Australia), who contacted us about a bend back hook for his barramundi fishing.

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Stinger


Not the missile – at all, but a hook. A stinger hook is defined by it’s shape (as most hooks), it’s placement in the fly and the way it’s attached to the hook. Stinger hooks are short, have a fairly deep bend and are up-eyed. The up-eye is important and I’ll get back to that. Stinger hooks can be used a different ways. They can be the one hook and a fly or they can be used as a two-hook-setup, most commonly on long flies.

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Our salmon hooks

When we started Ahrex we were of course painfully aware of the hooks that needed to be in our program. Salmon hooks were of course among them and since the beginning in 2016, we’ve been expanding the range and we’re not done yet. I’ll present a new hook at the end of this blog, so please read along.

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Seasons


In a fly fisher’s year there are always seasonal highlights that usually occur either when fishing for a particular species open, when seasons turn and not least when certain hatches occur. Some hatches are more important than others and they are of course not the same all over. Streams and still waters have different hatches that happen on different times. Most of them of course begin when spring begins to heat up the water.

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Nymphing for salmon?


Do salmon eat nymphs? Yes, at least as younglings in the river, before they enter the sea, they do. But I think it’s common knowledge that once they enter the rivers, they stop eating. How they manage to survive for several months and not least why they take our flies is a subject for another blog. However, it’s clear that salmon do take flies that imitate large stoneflies nymphs and even ones fished upstream and dead drifted past their lies.

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