Fly Fishing in the Nuclear Zone

Håvard goes fishing in a secret area in Northern Norway known as “The Zone”. For years, the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and the Norwegian government have been conducting secret weapons tests in the area, wiping out all animal life except the aquatic insects and the fish. As a consequence, the fish grow to enormous size. But if you want to experience this bonanza, you have to be prepared to pay the ultimate price…

Back in town

We came home two days ago. It feels kind of strange to be in a city again after the latest adventure. Since it never gets dark up there, we hardly got any sleep at all. Instead we had this strange and fantastic flow of fishing, filming, eating and laughing.

Some weird things happened, more about that will be showed later in the blog. Did we get any fish? Yes, we did. Did we loose any fish? Yes we did. Joona will tell you more about that. Here are some pics from the trip. Soon we’ll put up both beautiful and ugly movies, just wait and see! /Fredrik

Håvard casting

Alone on the mountain

Take a closer look!

Nice trout

Håvard enjoys something

Magic light of northern Scandinavia

Magic light 2

On the meny

At the fire place

Why is Tap smiling?

Our producer made some casts...

Tapani was very happy.

Beautiful Norway

Making Movies: Fly Fishing Short Film Now Online!

Hi!

Since we’re going away now for some ten days fishing in the norwegian tundra, we decided to give you a special treat: A very exclusive fly fishing short movie titled Slow Walking Water.

Håvard Stubø from JFF goes for the big trout of Ransarån in swedish lapland. The movie tries to capture the mood and soundscape of the journey.

This was my first attempt to shoot a short film, and it was basically just a field test for the equipment (Canon 550d/T2i, Beyerdynamic MC 930 pair, JuicedLink, Edirol). I had to be quite heavy with the directing since Håvard was talking all the time and he is supposed to be the only one there in the film…

The soundtrack was done in Copenhagen with a great norwegian guitar player, Magnus Wiik. He first came up with the theme in solo and I built the rest of the sounds and instruments later on top of it.

So there you have it. Fly fishing short movie. No real plot for this time, only mood from the beautiful river.

Any comments and feedback is welcome.

Tapani Toivanen
Jazz & Fly Fishing

Extreme arctic fishing ahead!

Hi

I’m just finishing my packing for the expedition we are going to make with the JFF team. The destination is far up north, about as far as you can get in Europe. Tomorrow I will travel to Kiruna in northern Sweden where I’ll catch up with the other guys. Then we drive further up north to a secret destination that might be revealed later. What I can tell you is that no jazz band has ever fished there before.

We are expecting to encounter big trout and arctic char on this trip. We know for sure that where we are heading there’s fish up to 5 kilos, and trout between 2 and 3 kilos are not rare. But if they are easy to catch, that’s another thing. There’s also the riskt that the northern wind can spoil the trip. Heavy winds from the North Pole can make fly fishing difficult at times. In the northernmost parts of Scandinavia there are hadly any trees to stop the wind either.So this trip is like gambling, we put all in and might get home empty-handed, or we might hit the jackpot.

We will of course be filming the action and the films will be published on this site. Be patient – for some reason we like to spend more time fishing than editing movies right now. As soon as we get back we’ll start working on the video footage!

Finnish Nonsense

Blog from Eco-Rapids #3

Hellau!

I´m back from Russia. Here are some interesting videos from our tour in Finland in early June.

The first one was made by Fredrik, who stole my camera and made this epic masterpiece entiteled Karja while I was searching desperately for the camera, thinking I´d forgotten it somewhere along the road:

The second film, What´s Up with the Lainen?, deals with the mythical Finnish word “lainen”.

Fredrik and I have been asking Finns about the meaning of this word for more than a year now, and we still haven´t gotten any good explanation for it. Poor Tapani is the victim this time:

Soon, we´ll go fishing together again! First, we´ll fish a mystical river somewhere on Nordkalotten for a couple of days, and then we´ll move into undiscovered country for a real expedition.

Stay tuned – lots more videos and stuff coming up!

News from Russia

Hello from Russia (with love)! My own Håvard Stubø Quartet has been touring in the Ukraine and Russia for some days now. It’s been great, Russia is really somehing else – big and ugly and scary and beautiful and very, very exciting, filled with incredibly friendly and open people. Hopefully we can do a tour in Russia and/or the Ukraine with JFF some time soon. We have made some plans, so let’s see what happens. Here are some random pics from the tour:

Picture gallery from the tour

Blog from Eco-Rapids #2

Here are some more photos from the Finnish tour. There were taken at Eco-Rapids by our guide Antti Härkönen, who is of course a fly fisherman, but also very much into music. He sings in a heavy metal band but after meeting us he’s totally into jazz and is considering going into modal jazz growl-scatting.

Thanks for the beautiful pics and good guiding Antti!

Fishing and Filming in Ransarån

Cheerio,

Here’s a quick photoblog from the Ransarån trip, which happened already two weeks ago. We made the trip with Håvard, Terje and myself aiming to catch some beautiful trout and of course, the arctic char.

Besides fishing, it was a very good opportunity to try out the capabilities of the new video gear that we had gotten. I attempted to shoot a short fishing movie with Håvard as the protagonist. It was a bit hard to make it look like he was the only one there, since he’s always talking… But I think I got a few good cinematic seconds here and there. Stay tuned, it will be posted here soon!

As a learning opportunity, the sight fishing there was excellent. We got one full night of incredible sight fishing. I didn’t catch anything, but had something like 15 opportunities on big cruising fish on around 1,5 to 2,5 kg range. Both trout and the arctic char. Håvard got the nice 1,45 kg arctic char in the end. Just looking at those beautiful fish is the best thing!

Here’s the photos from both the stills that we took, and the captures from the upcoming short film:

Tour feelings

Blog from Eco-Rapids #1

Greetings from the JFF mini tour in Finland! We started off with a gig in Helsinki, it was nice to be together again! We also saw some of the TV documentary for the first time and I can tell you it was special. Soon a year has gone since the TV-tour last summer and seeing all the places and happenings brought back the memories.

The gig was a lot of fun, we wrapped up and headed straight north towards Eco-Rapids in northeastern Finland. We have spent the last few days there fishing in a rapid called Kynäkoski and a smaller river Syväjoki, check out the pictures!

Tonight we have some very special fishing in Jyväskylä in Central Finland, and in the evening it’s time for the documentary and the gig again. We’ll be posting some videos and stuff soon, so stay tuned!

Restless in Ransarån

Tapani and I just came back from the legendary Ransarån. Terje Storsten, a great bass player/fly fisherman came with us on the trip. The objective of our little expedition was to hunt for the ultimate Nordic trophy fish – the big arctic char.

Ransarån offers excellent fishing for good-sized brown trout and arctic char, but what really sets it apart is the sight fishing conditions. To be able to see the fish in the water while you´re fishing for it makes things very exciting…

PS! Tapani filmed a lot with his Canon DSLR camera and hi-fi audio system on the trip, so you can expect some really cinematic stuff from Ransarån soon…

Finland here we come! Uusikadulla!!! Rajakala!!! Hevonk****!!!