Lets leave tackle reviews aside for a few moments. It’s time for another Troutin’ Story, this time in the far north, the far end of Sweden, beyond the polar circle.

I never thought I’d go on such an adventure, at least not in the near future, but unstable as I and Stefan are, we somehow took the Bear Grills approach to a fishing trip. As extreme as we could find in a month and a half’s time.

After writing about 8-10 e-mails, and about 8-10 phone calls further in the future, we finally came across someone who would take us out fishing into the wilderness of Sweden after the 30th of August. That’s about when the fishing season ends for about everyone that far north, but that’s when we were both available for this trip, and we needed to find someone available to take us. Mikko answered our preyers, and booked us for a helicopter flight into the wilderness….

Do I even have to mention the next few weeks passed like they were days?!

28th of August, late in the night
Panic attack was setting in. I couldn’t collect my thoughts regarding all the items I’d pack. No matter how I’d pack them it seemed I would never be able to make them fit in my backpack. We needed to go as light as posible. But you know us anglers… you can never go to light when it comes to tackle. You’d rather sacrifice a few clothing items instead of that handfull of lures. That’s exactly what we did… We went as light as we could with our clothing, and squeezed more lures than normal in all our boxes, we both preferred jerkbaits, especially the sallow ones, and tons of spoons. Other than a backpack we had to drag with ourselves a big bazuca, packed with rods, and Stefan’s wet suit… he insisted we had to take that as well, even if I wasn’t totally in on it.

30th of August – departure day

Departure - Timisoara International Airport - in Romania

5 hours and 3 planes later, Mikko was already instructing us on how to set up the Tentipi we rented, and was ready with our fishing passes and all the instructions we needed. We were leaving in about half an hour. It almost seemed unbelievable it was all happening. Did I forget to mention I never set foot in a heli before?… I guess not… how bad could it be?

15:10
We are loading everything in the helicopter. The bazuca with all our rods doesn’t fit… until Mikko finds the only way to make it fit… huh… that was a close call. As soon as the helicopter lifted we both knew there was no turning back. It was all or nothing. After a few miles flying just above the tree line,  the pilot pulls the stick, and we start gaining some altitude, and perspective on the land in front of us: water everywhere you looked, large rivers, small streams, ponds, swamps… that’s how Lapland looks from above.

Water, moss, brush, rocks, swamps, water, moss, brush, rocks.....

Mikko said this is a very good spot for enormous pike

Notice the white spot!... That's near our camping site!

It didn’t seem much, but we got to our final destination, our camping site, a small patch of leveled earth, moss and stones, right on the river bank. This is it! All forms of contact are useless from now on. We only have a pick up date. If something goes wrong we’ll have to make due. It’s just us, nature, on our own “private” patch of land, “rented” for 8 days. Is it overwhelming? It sorta is, considering all the unknowns… we only know what’s around us from the map Mikko left us.

17:30
We set up camp, the tent is unlike anything we were used to so far, similar to an amerindian tipi. It had a ventilation hole that was controllable from a set of strings that were stretched down the mast of the tent. The vent would come in handy when we had to warm up or dry our clothes at night, with the kerosene warmer Miko gave us. After setting up the tent we wasted no time in organizing our luggage and the rest of the stuff, in and outside the tent. Next step, believe it or not was to set up our gear. We were going to fish today, until sundown. We were placed right above a 200meter long water fall, and from what we knew, upstream from the waterfall we would catch only trout, and arctic char, while downstream we will find lots and lots of grayling as well.

The large opening in the river, right above the waterfall forms a huge lake.

Our "cabin", the Tentipi starts to take shape...

The Tentipi is up, and functional.

Notice the vent...

Lets prepare our rods now, and start fishing. After-all that's what we came here to do!

The salmonids season closes today, so if we caught any trout, we had to release them… grayling and whitefish were the only 2 species that we were allowed to retain for our dinner grill. That shouldn’t have been a problem… would it? Especially if fish was going to be our everyday dinner.

Jerkbaits were the preferred lures in the stretch of river we chose for this afternoon, but no grayling… it’s 21:00 and we’ve only caught trout so far. It’s frustrating considering we planned to eat fish every night. That’s how our food was portioned. But right on my last cast I miraculously manage to catch a grayling. If we would’ve planned it, this was almost impossible, but …. we have dinner … As Bear Grills always sais: “Food and fire are always good for moral!” ) If you haven’t tried baked onions and grilled fish… you have to… it’s impossible to describe how good that is.

Dinner!!!!!

31st of August 2011
5:00 Beat and tired, I truly can’t remember how we fell asleep last night. Stefan woke up first… his internal clock is like magic… and after waking me up as well, we established a game plan for today, and the days to come. Today we’ll explore the large lake formed on the river, right upstream the waterfall, trying to figure out a way to get across.

5:30 We got out of the tent, made our morning tea. Coffee was “banned” in our camp, and by the way… the tea we bought tastes like detergent. But that’s the tea we had, that’s the one we’ll drink, that’s the one we’ll learn to love.

Green tea... detergent aroma

6:30 The rain doesn’t seem to fold. It keeps on going, and we finally start fishing. Up to 50-150 meters from the shore, this large pool formed on the river, had water knee deep. We had to get where the fish were, and that meant at least waist deep water.  We went thru jerkbaits like crazy, to find the best one to catch them no matter where we were throwing them. I finally find the ONE, Rapala X-Rap 08. 5-6 casts with this lure caught me the same amount of trout… WOW! WOW my ass… I realized I only had 2 of them , and the first one was lost after the first 6 casts. I cast the second one, and after 4-5 more casts, and the same amount of trout caught on it, another hefty one brakes my line… As soon as they felt they were cornered, they started hitting their head against the rocky bottom in order to escape the lure. These were no ordinary trout by any mean.

Rain, fog, clouds... that's our weather for the next 8 days

Salmo Minnow 5cm was good, but not good enough...

I had no more X-Raps… And this was only the first day of fishing. Stefan quickly realized on what I was catching them… X-Rap it was for him as well. He caught them one after another. He had 3 of them. Lost 2 in a matter of 40 minutes, but he still had one left. You can trust me he would guard this one, even if his life depended on it.

Stefan noticed the X-Raps I was throwing, and started catching them one after another...

I was searching thru jerkbaits like crazy again, in order to find another one that was close to that efficient. I had to change my main line to braided, because I was loosing to many lures fishing with monofilament. I couldn’t control them very efficiently because of the elasticity of the line.

Did I say... one after another?

10:45 The excitement was cut short by Stefan. He sliped on a rock in knee deep water, and was already wet to the bone. In solidarity, you know what that means… get back to the camp site, make a fire, and change clothes, even if I would’ve preferred to fish some more.

That's the spot, where Stefan landed on his back in knee deep water

Later We went further up, towards the end of this large basin, where the river was flowing in it again. As I expected, Stefan, in each spot we fished caught them one after another with the X-Rap, while I was still searching for the right jerk bait. I got the beating of my life… but in the end I had an idea. After struggling to catch a few ones with a Vision Q-Go from Megabass, I had the idea of getting the feathered treble from a popper and adapt it to a Lucky Craft Pointer 65 SP. As soon as I did this, I started catching again, not only that, but it caught me the largest trout of the day, after a nearly humiliating experience, while I was constantly looking at Stefan as he was catching them one after another… This was the last trout of the day. We had to get back to camp, and build a fire.

First, and the only char we'd see this trip... and to think they lured us into this area...

Cute little fella.

Megabass Vision Q-GO... landed a few fat ones!

Pointer 65 SP, caught the largest trout of the day

1st of Septeber
7:00 After the exhausting hiking, fishing experience of yesterday… we knew we wouldn’t get up at 5 again. Stefan woke up first… The rain was still pouring. We took our breakfast inside the tent today. Scrambled eggs, cheese and a hefty portion of hungarian sausages .

The plan for today is to hike up to where this large pool in the river ends, and try to cross the river. Yesterday it looked as we could do it, an if we did, we had a new areas of virgin open water just for ourselves…

Hiking in any direction was challenging. The 50cm moss covering everything, felt like walking on a giant sponge. The moss was only interrupted by shrub, rocky terrain and swamps, no formed paths, other than those created by reindeer. The trip would take the entire day, so we packed all we needed in our backpacks.

20:30 After an entire day of fishing, with out initial plan, a partial failure: we didn’t find any way to get across, but had the best fishing game, upstream of the pool, we explored yesterday. We’ve only caught large trout today. Unlike yesterday, this area wasn’t as ideal for the X-Rap, which dove a bit deeper than needed. We’ve found that Yo-Zuri Pin’s Magnet and Lucky Craft Flash Minnow 95MR were doing a much better job.

Yo-Zuri Pin's Minnow Magnet, the star of the day!

Trout are genetically born to swim all their lives… so you can imagine it’s hard to make them understand it’s time to stop, even for a few moments, but in the end they had no choice, their muscles had to fail sometime, but so did our arms, which were in need of a brake, after 2-3 of these giant river trout.

This was a day of extremes, exhaustion, and tons of big ass trout. Stefan felt the need to slip for the second time, and we had to withdraw to our “comfy” cabin again… I would’ve preferred more fishing, but we had a pact… and had to keep to it. It was to risky to be anywhere far away from camp alone… anything could happen… far away from, well…. everything.

Panorama of the water-fall near our camping site

Keep tuned for more wild adventures!

About Andrei

Professional angler, rodbuilder, lurebuilder, if it's about fishing you name it, he does it. He hates "relaxing", and takes each day as a challange. Whenever he's got a spare moment he's either fishing, cycling, hiking or training his ass at the gym. He's fishing for more than 20 years now. Strictly on artifficial baits from the age of 7, he's always on the look out for the newest stuff and techniques out there.

View all posts by Andrei →

After a long night sleep in our comfy Coleman tent a coffee was really refreshing at 5:00 o’clock in the morning. I was going to fish the largest, and deepest of the lakes in the area. You have to understand that glacier trout are really finicky, considering 9 out of 10 days they feed on insects rather than minnows. Of course the large ones prefer the minnows, but those are solitaire and cautious, and more often very difficult to catch.

Mobile phone panorama of lake Bucura

Let’s now get back to some more fishing. I only fished for 3-4 hours without any results, other than a couple of strikes. Trout were present, as I’ve seen a couple jumping, and a lot of them feeding on flies on the surface, but it seems I haven’t been able to convince any of them. It’s not my last day here, and we still have a lot to explore, as you’ll see.

Enough fishing for the day, we have some serious hiking ahead of us. Even if we have set foot to go to the deepest glacier lake in Romania (no fishing rod this time – no permit to fish in that area), we passed the mark that should’ve lead us there, deviating 20 minutes from our original trail.

It's Romanian for "Danger"

Nice excuse for a break ... "Let's take a few pictures:))"

Is this the right way?... NOPE

We decided to follow this trail to one of the tallest peaks in the area, Retezat peak 2483 meters high. In total a 3-4 hour hike to the summit, and another 2-3 hours back. It’s a medium difficulty hike, that I don’t recommend if you’re scared of heights, because it’s as nature left it, except the trails are marked.

Only 2251m ?!.... Another 231 to climb

Made it to the sumit.

Another cell phone panorama of Retezat peak

The weather was with us on this day. No wind on the summit... no one could believe it

This was it for the day. We were exhausted when we got back, so no fishing.

Next day we were engulfed in thick fog, so our plans to go to lake Zanoaga were again left aside. After the fog scattered enough we decided to to make a shorter hike, considering the weather was unstable, to Peleaga summit, 2509m high – 1.5-2 hour hike to the summit, and about the same back. This is a medium to light difficulty hike, with a few rougher spots.

Here dogy, dogy...

Peleaga summit.

Retezat mountains

Enough hiking … I have a special date with some trout mamasitas.

After returning to base camp from Peleaga, I just couldn’t stay still. I had to go fishing. As I said, until you figure them out you’d think these trout are impossible to catch. I’ve had a lot of strikes, but again, no fish. Something wasn’t right. I had to fool them somehow. I’ll have the next day just for doing that, and nothing else. One entire day just for trout fishing.

Long hike for no fish!

Tired as I was, I just couldn’t get up at 5 o’clock again. We woke up at 8-8:30, had our traditional food breakfast: home made dried and smoked ham, tomatoes, fresh cheese (darn… my pack was heavy on the way in), had a coffee, and now I needed a plan. I’ve seen a lot of minnows with large black spots on them, white belly, almost black back. None of my spoons matched the description. This might have been one of the problems. Luckily I always carry a black marker with me, just in case. I’ve put my artistic talent to work, and painted about half of the lightest spoons I had with me. No need for the heavy ones. This lake wasn’t very deep.

I finally cracked the glacier rout code.

Panther Martin no.2 on the job

Packed and ready… let’s do some trout fishing. They were feeding all over the lake. Anywhere was a good place to start. After struggling with my hand painted spoons for about half an hour I had about 10-15 strikes, but still… couldn’t catch any. Have tried the Megabass Izabella spoon again, but with no luck on this lake. The area was overstocked with black and yellow striped flies. I could easily mistake them for wasps if I didn’t know better. I needed something to imitate, at least the colors, because I wasn’t fly fishing. I must try out those Panther Martins. It was really sunny outside, so I chose a copper bladed one with yellow body and black stripes. It was an instant hit. Only 2 casts and the fun was on.

I was catching about every 5-7 casts, and had at least 1-2 fish follow the spinner each cast. Just amazing. I finally cracked it. The majority were under 30cm, but in 3 hours fishing I managed to catch about 20 trout between 25 and 35cm. Tons of fun these little guys.

And when you thought there was no one to take me a picture.

I was starving, so i had to go eat some, but got my ass back for some more fun. They weren’t as active as they were earlier. A storm front was closing in, so I had to get me some picture worthy fish. Surprise… only the larger ones were biting. After catching a few 30-40 cm ones I had to change to a larger spoon. I just couldn’t resist the temptation. Lucky guess… on the first, and last cast I’ve nailed he largest one so far. Amazing fight on 3lb line with this one.

The big one on the last cast.

The rain just started pouring after this one, so I had to report back to base. It was an amazing C&R experience, with no one to bother me. Had tons of fun. The landscape here is amazing, as you can see from the pictures, and you might be surprised of what kind of wild life you might see. For the first time in my life I’ve seen a wild marmot… didn’t get the chance to get a picture, as it was running scared on the Retazat mountains vertical cliffs.

I’ll definitely come back next year for some more adventures!

P.S. All trout were released!

About Andrei

Professional angler, rodbuilder, lurebuilder, if it's about fishing you name it, he does it. He hates "relaxing", and takes each day as a challange. Whenever he's got a spare moment he's either fishing, cycling, hiking or training his ass at the gym. He's fishing for more than 20 years now. Strictly on artifficial baits from the age of 7, he's always on the look out for the newest stuff and techniques out there.

View all posts by Andrei →

It all started last year, with an exceptional trout fishing trip trough Romania for a week, when I’ve fished all over the country, trout only. Rivers, lakes, whatever I could find, I investigated. I knew I’d go over 2000 meters in 2010 both hiking and fishing all together. Nothing on earth like it!

Splashy big fella...

Try to catch them by hand if you can. It's what happens when you leave home without a fishing net.

I decided to go hike fishing for 5-6 days. I got my car to the actual end of the road, where I left it for the next 5 days. From there a 2 hour hike to the place where we would camp. I had at least 60-65 lbs of luggage, so not such an easy hike. I really enjoy sight seeing, hiking on designated routes on summits, or other glacier lakes, so it’s not all about fishing. There’s nothing like it in the world. This is how freedom looks like, no cell phones, no one to bother you. It’s like problems never existed, you’re lost in the moment.

You thought this hike was easy? Just climbing on rough terrain. No wonder cars or bikes can't get there.

Nice soft moss all over the place.

To go on such a hike you need some basic equipment, besides your designated fishing tackle. You can’t leave home without a good pair of hiking boots, but that’s a must for any fisherman, tent, sleeping bag, stove. Besides your large backpack, I’d recommend a  smaller one just for 2 to 6 hour hikes that can fit the basics: food, waterproof clothing, water, your camera, and of course, some fishing tackle. You might enjoy a nice synthetic fleece that acts as a wind stopper as well. I’d highly recommend it, as at over 2000 meters altitude,  temperatures can plummet 10-15 degrees in less than 5 minutes.

If you prefer warm food and tea the stove is a must. You have about zero wood at this altitude, plus you’d ruin the scenery,that’s almost 100% intact.

Lets get back to after that 2 hour hike to “base camp”.

For whoever knows me, I can’t stay put, not even if I’m dead tired. As soon as me and my girl friend got the tent installed, and everything inside it prepared for the first night sleep, we made a 30 minutes hike to a nearby lake. We lost the trail, and had to follow the boulders that were going straight towards the lake. I’m used to jumping rocks and boulders, I actually prefer hiking over this kind of terrain, as it keeps my brain focused, and forget about the fatigue or muscle pain, but for whoever is not used to it it can be hell on earth. This is the extreme side of fishing, I guess.

Still not tired? You'll have to climb this to go to bed ).

Luckily it's all downhill to the lake.

We got to the lake, and it only took 20 seconds to spot a few trout. It’s a shallow glacier lake, not more than 1.5m-2m deep, but it’s filled with trout. Not the largest, but enough to have fun. Even though the lake has tons of minnows, these trout are focused on insects. That means they are really hard to catch on spinning gear with regular tactics. Even so you can trick them with dead accurate casts. I don’t know how many of you are used to spinning sight fishing, but it’s tons of fun, and you can see it all happen. You just need to find the perfect lure that they’ll hit as soon as it touches the water. For me the Megabass brown Izabella did the trick. The steps were: spot a trout, concentrate, cast into it’s field of vision so it can hit your lure as soon as it touches the water, and you’re on. Not all of them will get your lure, but you’ll trick a lot of them this way. They sometimes need to see the lure move for 1-2 seconds before actually biting.

Preparing my rod.

This is how paradise must look like. I didn't think it would get better than this... but it does.

Not the largest trout you'll see, but still, good practice. Izabella didn't let me down this time.

I’ve caught a few of them. Nothing picture worthy, but I had a lot of fun perfecting this fishing technique, and of course, releasing them. We had enough for the day, so we return to the camping site for a long night rest. Tomorrow we have a long hike ahead of us, unlike anything we’ve seen in our lives.

Keep tuned! I have more to tell…

About Andrei

Professional angler, rodbuilder, lurebuilder, if it's about fishing you name it, he does it. He hates "relaxing", and takes each day as a challange. Whenever he's got a spare moment he's either fishing, cycling, hiking or training his ass at the gym. He's fishing for more than 20 years now. Strictly on artifficial baits from the age of 7, he's always on the look out for the newest stuff and techniques out there.

View all posts by Andrei →