Concluding my fishing season so far

I arrived Mountain View, California with my wife and daughter on Saturday and I'll be here for the next 5 weeks. This means that the early part of my fishing season has ended and it's time to wrap up how it has been so far.

Fishing in Utsjoki river was ok although the water was really high the whole time. I gained a lot of experience but managed to catch also something. The best thing is I broke my own fly salmon record, ie. I caught my biggest salmon ever by fly fishing. The record is still not that impressive, about 3.5 kg, but still it's my record.

In the end I managed to go fishing in Vetsijoki river only once although it is my favorite river. I didn't catch anything but instead lost a very good fly as a salmon about the same size as my new record broke the tippet line.

This summer I also went to fish in Vesterelva river in Norway for the first time ever. It is quite a nice salmon river and I'm certainly going to go fish there also in the future. But that has to be after the first week of July as I heard that the salmon really starts to get into that river in big numbers from the second week of July onwards.

Fishing in Vesterelva

I was fishing with my brother in law in Vesterelva in Norway on Friday evening and Saturday. I've heard a lot of good about the river, the river is full of salmon and they bite your bate (actually only fly allowed) more eagerly than in most of the rivers. So our hope were high when we headed there. First negative surprise was the cost of fishing license for Vesterelva. We had to first buy the Norway's national fishing license which was 275 NOK for a year (we were told you can't get the license for a shorter period). And then we bought the 24 hour license for the river which was 300 NOK. So all together we paid 575 NOK each for a day's license...I think it's something like 65 €. I know there are lot more expensive rivers even in Norway, but this is more expensive than for example the licenses for Teno river and I think it's quite a lot for a small river like Vesterelva.

The next disappointment was that we didn't catch anything. It was a new river for both of us, so we didn't know where to focus our fishing efforts. Also we heard from the local fishing guard that there hasn't been a lot of salmon in the river this summer. Also some fishing tourists that had been fishing there for years confirmed this. Maybe it's because the water is very high and cold? Oh well...I'll go there again next summer as the river is anyhow very beautiful and in the end we were shown the places where to focus our fishing to be effective.