Fall, Thy Name Is Melancholy

Today, I started going through my photos from this summer.
The summers in Lapland are just so desperately short, and it breaks my heart that the next season up there is well over half a year away.

Amidst all the pictures from this summer´s more successful fishing trips, I found some pictures that puzzled me a bit. At first I couldn´t remember having taken these photos at all, but after watching them for a while it all started coming back. This late-July evening was nothing special, really: I fished for five or six hours, going first to one my favourite rivers. Despite nice weather and little or no wind, the action there was very slow, so I tried a beautiful lake which holds big trout and arctic char instead. That place can sometimes offer spectacular sight fishing in gin-clear water. Well, not this time.

On the way home I decided to try a couple of casts on a third spot. A big, sparkling clear mountain stream pours its icy cold, turqoise-tinted water into a large lake, creating huge flats of white sand. The river´s glassy main current carves a slightly deeper, snake-like trench in the bottom of the flats. And these deeper areas always hold fish. Sometimes small fish, sometimes big fish – you never know until you try. On this particular night, the place held moderate numbers of medium-sized fish that took my flies half heartedly. The whole evening felt, in lack of a better word, quite mediocre, and that´s probably the reason why I couldn´t remember having taken those pictures at first.

Right now, in Oslo´s urban desert, in God Damn October, with Lapland dry fly fishing in the midnight sun at least seven months away, it´s painfully clear to me that there was nothing mediocre about it.