Down by The River

For most people fly-fishing is the escape from everyday duties, stress and a ringing phone. Just you and the water, the lake or river and the Zen-like quality that it brings. For others it’s the action, the zero to sixty when a barn door of a trout or salmon takes your fly and empties your reel of all line. If you really get it in your blood it absorbs you. You become a fish bum, a trout bum, a salmon junkie. One that priorities walking miles along rivers looking for rising trout, living in a crappy 4WD, eating something that resembles food, drinking way to cheap beer, running out of flies so you end up tying new ones in the light of a head lamp, you work just enough to be able to go fishing, get abandoned by another redhead that you met in a bar just because you spend way to much time on the water.

It is said that trout never live in ugly places. Well, our backyard, the mountains of Scandinavia, is the perfect setting for a never-ending fly fishing adventure. From beginner to expert. Just ask fly-fishing guide Henrik Wallberg, who has a large chunk of Europe as his work place but always comes back to these rivers.

– As a guide you chase favorable conditions, insect hatches, runs of fish coming in from the ocean. The trips we organize follow the same schedule. You start the season on the Swedish west coast, hunting sea run brown trout. Then off to Scotland for the early dry fly fishing for brown trout and the spring run of Atlantic salmon. One of the high points of the season is May in the Slovenian alps. But after that, finally, the winter has given up here in our backyard and the conditions are just right for trout, grayling and arctic char in the mountains, salmon in the rivers entering the fjords of Norway or the Baltic and huge trout sipping mayflies of the surface of the local lakes. There are quite a few rivers around the world that I perceive as my home waters, rivers about which I know every stream, every rock, deep hole and riffle, but there is something special about the rivers here at home. And they are truly world class.