Urban Fly Fishing in Oslo

Urban trout – just another urban legend?

No! Check this out:

Håvard vs the Volcano

Tomorrow, I was supposed to go on tour in Russia and the Ukraine with my own band, the Håvard Stubø Quartet, but now it seems like it´s all gonna be canceled. God damn it.

The reason is of course the volcano Eyjafjallajökull on Iceland, which is currently spewing out an enormous cloud of ashes all over northern Europe, grounding all air traffic in Norway, Denmark, the UK, western Russia, etc.

Tapani was supposed to come, too, he´s sitting in for the band´s regular bass player, Torbjörn Zetterberg. We were really looking forward to the trip – I´ve never been to Russia or the Ukraine before, and was very excited about going there.

There might still be some hope of making the tour, or at least making the Ukraine part of it happen. Let´s see. Seems like it will take a major shift in the weather or a pause in the eruption to make flying possible…

Well, here´s some video from the bloody volcano:

And these local guys are taking it with a (slightly uncomfortable) smile:

Aaaaaarrrggghhhh!

As the merciless Scandinavian winter slowly moves towards spring, my urge to go fishing is getting stronger by the minute, and I´m scanning the fly fishing forums day and night, googling all over the place for some kind of satisfaction. All this does is of course to make the urge even stronger. I´m getting pretty desperate, and I really don´t know what to do about it.

The weather outside my window here in Oslo is very pretty, with clear blue skies and no wind. The only problem is that the temperature is around -10 C… The meteorologists say that the sea ice hasn´t been this thick and widespread since 1987, so there is no chance for any saltwater seatrout fishing either. You can almost walk between Norway and Denmark. Seriously!

Well – I guess all we can do is wait. While we wait, I have a couple of links for you (all in Norwegian, I´m afraid, but still worth checking out, if only for the pics and vids):

www.utras.net: A brand new Norwegian blog about fly fishing by two guys from Tromsø and Harstad. Mostly about trout and salmon fishing up north.

www.fluefiskesiden.no: This site has a very active forum. The fly tying and entomology stuff there is outstanding.

www.fluefiske.net: Excellent fly fishing site which is updated frequently with news and articles. The forum is also very good.

And then a couple of pics just to put some more napalm on the fire:

A couple of concerts – and a couple of fishing trips

I´ve been to some really good concerts in Oslo the last couple of weeks. The first one was with a trio called The Thing, and the venue was Victoria. The band consists of the hard-hitting swede Mads Gustafsson on saxophones (this guy can make the saxophone sound like a wounded T-Rex!), and the well known Norwegian power duo Ingebrigt Håker flaten and Paal Nilssen-Love on bass and drums, respectively. The Thing plays loud free jazz, and their repertoire is really varied – classic rock songs mixed with lesser known jazz pieces and other stuff, all treated very freely and with ferocious energy. I´ve heard this trio several times, but never enjoyed them as much as I did on this occasion. The music had much more dynamics than the previous concerts I´ve heard with them – perhaps in part because of the relatively spacious venue? Anyway – a really good concert.

The other concert I´d like to mention was an in-store mini concert with Swedish singer-songwriter Folke at Platekompaniet Oslo City. This music is by no means jazz, but rather classic singer-songwriter stuff more related to folk music and the music of Vincent Gallo. But that´s besides the point – good music is good music, no matter what genre it belongs to. The short session featured beautiful tunes and strong playing, and despite (or because of?) the totally unplugged setting, the power of the music really came through. Highly recommended!

I´ve done some fishing, too: A couple of trips to the lakes of Nordmarka, just outside of Oslo. Typical autumn fishing – slow action, but beautiful scenery. The many lakes in Nordmarka all hold brown trout, and some of them can have decent fishing at times – of course it´s never as good as the fishing we had on this summer´s tour, but still it´s pretty good for being so close to a big city. I caught some small trout on the first trip, lost a good one, and my friend (the excellent bassplayer Roger Arntzen) and I had a really good time. On my second trip I brought a real Nordmarka expert, Vegard Veberg, with me to see if I could pick up some of the secret tricks of the trade. Fishing in these dense forest landscapes is quite different from the Lapland/mountain fishing I normally do, so I really needed some expert advise to get confident with this style of fly fishing. Vegard is not only an expert fly fisherman, but also an accomplished writer and photographer. And, sure enough, Vegard managed to catch a pretty good Nordmarka trout on a small, black dry fly – it was around 750 g. I caught nothing, but picked up quite a few tips for future trips. Great fun!

We´re gonna keep doing this!

The tour was a blast. I had the best time ever. Seriously! Although touring with the TLQ and the camera crew was a lot of fun, coming home to my little family wasn´t too bad either…

There are lots of things going on at the moment. Since the tour ended, I´ve released a new record with my own quartet. The reviews have all been excellent, and the releaseparty at Oslo Jazzfestival was a lot of fun. You´ll find some fresh sound here.

Right now, the TLQ is working with several interesting future plans for the JFF concept. Firstly, we´ll do a tour in the spring, playing in Norway and Sweden. During the tour, we´ll of course be fishing – mostly in saltwater for seatrout and proper saltwater fish like big sei, cod and maybe even the elusive halibut… We didnt have the time to do any serious saltwater fishing on this first tour, but April/May is an excellent time for saltwater fly fishing, so this is going to be a lot of fun! We´ll be putting out pics & videos from the gigs and the fishing as we move along. Furthermore, our first full-length CD recording is coming up soon, and we´re also toying with some really big plans for the future – more on that later…

Anyway, the point is that we´re gonna keep doing this! It´s just been too much fun, and it feels like we´re just getting started. We´ll keep on playing gigs with the Tight Lines Quartet, we´ll keep on fishing together, and we´ll keep you guys posted. The response from the general public has been overwhelming, and people from all over the world have been checking out our material, giving lots of good feedback. Keep on doing that!

First and foremost, we´re going to keep the blogs coming. We´ll be writing about all kinds of stuff that goes on in our lives. Being huge jazz & fly fishing-nerds, it´s of course  going to be mostly jazz and flyfishing-related stuff, but I guess we´ll  be touching on lots of diferent topics. For example, I´m going to recommend some really cool jazz records and maybe review a concert or two, Fredrik is going to show us some of his secret cooking tricks, and Joona might enlighten us on the deep connections between jazz piano and fly tying. And, being a medical scientist, Tapani might be able to give a scientific description of what he does to make women´s hearts beat so fast…

PS! I´ve stumbled upon some decent lakes in Nordmarka, very close to Oslo. Blog coming up soon!