Icefishing & freeskiing in the untouched wilderness Pt:2

Skins

"BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!" the alarms went off at 06:00 the following morning. All three of us was a bit worn out from the previous night. When the evening came the night before it got really dark, and what do three guys do when they have to pass time in a cabin way of the grid? They play cards and drink beer of course. At least that’s what we did. But we knew that we were going to get up early the next morning so we tried not to drink too much and stay up too late. But we could still feel it as we pulled our selves up from our comfortable beds, and started getting ready for a day on the ice.

The sun had just risen above the pine trees and was spreading light all over the surrounding mountains. It was -22 degrees outside and the air was still. My beard got covered in frost almost instantly. Lovely! We packed the most of our gear into a sledge and started moving towards the other side of the lake. There we left the sledge at the fishing spot and kept moving towards the shore. We had a plan you see. We wanted to make it up to one of the mountain tops. We were excited about the view that we would get from up there but we were also looking forward to the untouched snow that we would ski through on our way down. Me and Jacob had procured all mountain skis with ski skins so that we easily would make our way up the mountain and also enjoy it on the way down. But as we started to go uphill i noticed that my skins weren’t behaving as they were supposed to. They kept falling off and I could not go any further upward. I turned around and went down back to the ice. Otto followed me down. I actually think that he was relieved that he could stay down on the ice and catch some fish instead. Jacob however kept going.

We had brought walkie talkies and every five minutes he would call just to see that we could still hear him. After about 20 minutes he said that he had found a road, then he said that he found a car parked on the side of that road. I found that quite peculiar since there are not supposed to be any roads in the direction he was going when he left us. Before I had time to think about that any further he said that he realized that it was our car and that he apparently had lost his bearings and gone round in a circle. After that he came back to us out on the ice since he was too tired to start from the beginning again. I could tell that he was disappointed. Both he and I had been looking forward to that climb the whole winter. But hey, less time on the skis equals more time to catch some fish! So we all started drilling holes in the ice. We tried several types of lures but the most successful one was a spoon with maggots as bait.

 Here fishy fishy fishy

Now we were multitasking. We had drilled several holes and had different rods placed all over the bay we were fishing in to maximize our chances. Not that it helped me. I only caught one fish and it was this small grayling. I know, it's not super small but i had my mind set for bigger fishes. Previous years I've caught several graylings in this size and most times at least a couple of 50 cm long ones and some decent trouts. But at least I caught this one. I could've gone home with nothing!

But this year Otto was by far the the most successful fisherman. He caught several graylings and a couple of nice trouts as well. But he did fight for it. He ran from hole to hole, walked closer and closer to the edge were there were open water, just so he would have tried every possible place. And that is typical Otto. Ever since he was little he was always first to put the fly in the water an the last one to lift it out. Skam den som ger sig!

Jacob on the other hand was the luckiest. He got two decent trouts and both them got hooked when he was of doing something else. One of the fishes he caught decided to eat the maggots on the rod that was furthest away from him at the moment. Luckily for us I was sitting right next to it. The surface in the hole was frozen so the line was stuck in a thin layer of ice. I took my knife and got rid of the ice layer and then held the rod so Jacob could come over and reel him in. At first I thought it was another burbot (see pt.1) because it was so slow, but when it came up through the hole we saw that it was the biggest trout that we had caught so far this trip! It had probably been stuck there for a while, before I noticed it, so if it weren't for the frozen hole it would have gotten away, with rod and all.  It was a beautiful fish and I think that I speak for all of us when I say that it would have been way more fun to have have caught it on a dry fly on a warm summer night. 

The hours passed and we decided to call it a day. We had one day left and we wanted to make the most of it. We said that we would be more careful with the beer that evening and go to bed sooner. I guess we will see how that turned out.

To be continued....