Blane Chocklett testing Game Changers on Jack. Photo: Blane Chocklett.
Ahrex Hooks and Blane Chocklett Present the XO784 – The Ultimate Game Changer Hook
Ahrex Hooks proudly introduces a brand-new hook series: the XO784 BC Game Changer – developed in close collaboration with Blane Chocklett. This innovative hook is the first ever designed specifically for the Game Changer shank system.
Where the road begins and home for the Ammarnäs trout and trophy Grayling
The village Ammarnäs is located in the western part of Swedish Lapland in Northern Sweden and around 100-200 people lives here, depending on season The slogan for Ammarnäs is,” Where the road begins” and if you look at the map, you can see why, or choose to see that only one road leads from or to Ammarnäs. If you travel up here by car or by bus, you can make a pitstop in the little bigger society Sorsele and pay a visit at Hook and Cup Sorsele Visitor Center. They have staff that knows a lot about flyfishing a little shop with fishing gear, a cafe and a museum. From Sorsele it´s only 90 kilometers on the road left up to Ammarnäs and the brown trout paradise.
By Mikael Lindström
Photos by Mikael Lindström, Henrik Kure & Morten Valeur
(this artickle has been published in the online magazine “FFE Magazine”)
We’re heading into the cold season and when fly fishing for sea trout in Scandinavia, most fly fishers turn to provocative flies. Chartreuse, orange and especially pink are important colours. This really is a development that began taking place in Denmark in the late 1980s, particularly in and around Mariager Fjord in the middle of Jutland.
Outside the office windows the inevitable sign of winter has dressed the landscape in white. It’s been snowing the last few days, which of course means that temperatures are dropping. It takes a while for the water temperature begin cooling down significantly, but with frost both day and night, it’s certainly under way. Dropping temperatures are not the best conditions, but cold water is not a problem as such. For the fish of course. It might be for the two legged creatures chasing them.
We’re usually not slow to let you know abut new hooks, but it seems that other blog subject have been more important, because we actually snuck in a new hook in the Predator series. It’s getting cold and once in a while, especially as it gets even colder, you sometimes need to pick up the fish on the bottom. On the bottom there’s usually a lot of debris, so fishing an upside-down hook can be a very good idea.
We have decided that we’ll start running a series of blogs with the same theme – Three Flies. These won’t be the usual “if you could only have three flies…”, but more as an inspiration to those starting fly fishing or venturing in to new species and locations. We’ll try and mobilise some of our Ahrex ambassadors and ask them about three essential flies for their fishing and local conditions. Since we’ll depend on the good will of our ambassadors and others as well, they won’t be regular entries, but ones that we’ll run every now and then. They’ll be seasonally relevant as well.
I’m generally very reluctant to use the word, “iconic”, but in the case of Jack Gartside’s Gurgler I think it fits. Gartside died in 2009, but has left a legacy of so many flies, for so many different applications. Many of them all-purpose flies that are at home on a bass lake as they are in the salt.
Summer is upon us, which as so many other seasons offer new opportunities. Sea trout are migrating to the rivers and many really don’t start fishing for them until now – myself included. It’s fun fishing, often in the evenings and in the dark and that feeling of a sea trout grabbing a big, black tube fly in the surface often startles me. The big ones can sound like someone dropped a refrigerator on the fly and feel like it too.
I’m sure there’s some truth behind that – to an extent, because it’s certainly far from impossible to catch big fish on small flies. However, this is about big flies and there can be little doubt that big, predatory fish mainly feed to bigger prey, mostly smaller fish. A dense hatch of bugs will bring any trout up, but a bif fly will tempt them consistently, all year round.
Today I’m pleased to present af blog text from Matt Redmond, who has kindly submitted this text about his awesome looking streamer flies and how he fished them. Matt Redmond is an avid fly angler and tier based in Northeast Ohio. He’s spent the last decade exploring the Great Lakes and their connecting waters with a special interest in steelhead, smallmouth bass, and freshwater drum.