Dark is the Night (at least somewhere)

Mariager Fjord 16-08-13

Summer is fast approaching, and with it, lots of sun and higher water temperatures. Both contribute to a change in behaviour of the sea trout. It’s possible, by choosing the right spots and adapting your techniques and strategy, to catch sea trout all through the day during the summer. But there’s no doubt that concentrating your efforts in the hours around sunset and sunrise increases your chance of a hook-up to two.

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Vulgatas and danicas

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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…

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The trout don’t always rise…

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Dry fly fishing is fascinating and I’m quite certain that all fly fishers agree. Watching a fish slowly and confidently sip down an imitation is, for me at least, the pinnacle of fly fishing. But alas, trout don’t always rise. In fact I suppose it’s correct to say that most of the time, they don’t. If you’re a die hard dry fly fisher, you wait (and perhaps cry a little) and you stay home during the cold months. I personally love dry fly fishing for trout and grayling, but I don’t stay home during the cold months, and I don’t (always) spend a day at the river, waiting for the 45 minutes at noon when the temperature rises just enough for a short burst off insect hatches.

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Spring

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April 1st is just around the corner, and that means spring. After a winter with more rain than ever recorded before in Denmark, it’s been really strange that within a few days, we went from rain-rain-rain-endless-rain to clear skies (and frosty nights). None the less, even though fishing has been good all winter (pike and sea trout in the salt) because of the mild winter, the salt is certainly waking up and beautiful sea trout are being caught all over.

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Cinnamon Saltwater Shrimp

At his time of the year the trophy for the coastal flyfisher is silver-coloured.

Over 20 years ago, I was visiting a small fly shop here in Denmark called “Fugl & Fjer Fluebinding”. Directly translated that means Bird and Feather Flytying. The shop was run by my good friend, Jens Pilgaard, and was essentially a specialty shop for materials for classic salmon flies. I didn’t tie classic salmon flies back then, but Jens’ shop was always a treat to visit, because one would always stumble over something new or strange to tie onto a hook.

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Streamers, bucktails and Mickey Finn – part II

I don’t know how many hooks on the market can be classified as “streamer hooks”, and we often get asked why we have one in our line up when there are so many on the market. And that is of course a valid question, and the only answer is that we had to. We had to have a classic streamer hook – we couldn’t be a serious hook brand of we hadn’t.

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Streamers, bucktails and Mickey Finn

I don’t know how many hooks on the market can be classified as “streamer hooks”, and we often get asked why we have one in our line up when there are so many on the market. And that is of course a valid question, and the only answer is that we had to. We had to have a classic streamer hook – we couldn’t be a serious hook brand of we hadn’t.

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Softhackles – spiders – North Country wets – flymfer

We have a saying in Danish, which directly translated goes “Dear child has many names”, which is another way of saying that we have many different ways of talking about the things we really love. Among the simplest of flies – perhaps the simplest of them all, except for Oliver Kite’s “Bare Hook Nymph”, which was a hook with a copper wire thorax, are the softhackles, also knwn as flymphs (flymer in Swedish), spiders and perhaps most correct as North Country Wets.

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