Staffan Lindström, Henrik Leth and Danish split cane rod, building legend, Bjarne Fries, photographed at Rena Fiske Camp.
Another of the great. Scandinavian fly fishers is no longer among us. On the morning of January 17th, Staffan Lindström passed away. Not long ago he was diagnosed with cancer to which he finally succumbed. Staffan was an innovator, an excellent caster and fisherman, trout bum, outdoors man in the word’s truest meaning and a giving person.
Photocredit: Fly Fishing nation – @flyfishingnation
Salmon season is over and in general I think it’s been a fair season over most of Northern Europe and the UK. Instead of taking a look at season statistics, huge fish, happy stories, stories of the lost fish, I’ll turn you over to Stephen Carella, who in this nice story takes a look at something important that sometimes happens when you go fishing. Making friends – an important aspect of flyfishing.
On southern Fyn (the isle in the middle of Denmark, which happens to have some extraordinarily good sea trout fishing) you’ll find a rarity – at least in Denmark. No, it is in fact something as ordinary as a fishing lodge. There plenty of fishing lodges around the world, and yet, Denmark Fishing Lodge on the edge of Helnæs Bay on Fyn was the first, full-service fishing lodge in Denmark.
We’re proud of our Scandinavian roots, so hooks for Scandinavian saltwater were the first we released. Pike on the fly also has a long tradition in Scandinavia, and I know he’s not going to like this, but it has to be said – Morten was one of the pioneers over 30 years ago and has been very influential in developing the fishing and the flies, so pike hooks were just as important to us.
Rackelhanen is an unusual fly, originated by the Swedish trout- and grayling legend, Kenneth Boström in 1967. Kenneth Boström is well known in Scandinavia and originator not only of this quite excellent fly, but also the Rackelhanen fly rod, which is/was a three-piece rod with a split cane bottom section and two carbon fiber tip sections.
A signature is something personal, be it the name you sign under legal documents, an artistic style, an icon, a sign, a seal – something personalised. In fly fly tying it can be a material, a style, a certain technique or a special fly.
The largest mayfly in Scandinavia are the Ephemera danica and it’s stillwater relative, the E. vulgata. The are the same size and the vulgata tend to be a little darker than the danica. They hatch more or less at the same time, and both of course offer excellent fishing. Our “house fly tier”, Håkan Karsnäser lives close to the Hökensås lakes in Sweden and fishes the hatch every year, so I asked Håkan for a few tips and tricks, and a couple of good flies. Over to Håkan…
Imagine an English gentleman and his wife, in a beautiful, big Jaguar with two 17’ Falcon split cane fly rods strapped to the roof, driving down a small access road to a majestic, Norwegian river and you have an image of inventor of what is one of the most succesful flies of the 20th century.
With the Covid-19 virus spread all around the globe, and many countries in different states of lock-down, some even under curfue, these are indeed strange times. In Denmark most workplaces are either shut down or kept running with a minimum of personnel. We are still here at Ahrex HQ – and we are well under government recommendations in terms of number of people in one location and we have plenty of space between us.
It might sound a bit pretentious for a company as young as Ahrex to tell it’s story now, but we get a lot of questions on when, how, where, why and who when we’re on shows and from retailers and distributors. And prompted by J. Stockard, I decided to ask Søren and Morten some of these questions and let them tell the story.
