Salmon...what salmon?

Now it's official...I'm a bad fisherman. That's why this blog is called fisher wannabe :)
I'm now back to Oulu and done salmon fly fishing for this summer. This was the fourth summer since I started fly fishing salmon and the first time I didn't catch any of those beautiful and tasty creatures!
I was in Utsjoki for 12 days and fished in 9 of those days for about 40 hours altogether. I fished in Vetsijoki and Utsjoki rivers and the only action was in Utsjoki with a small salmon, tintti, which somehow escaped after a couple of minutes fight.

As any fisherman, good or bad, I can blame some of the bad fishing luck on the conditions. The early part of the first week I was up north there was still some new fish swimming up to Teno river and its tributaries and they were quite active. But towards the end of that week it all basically stopped as the water on Teno river got very high because of the heavy rains espeacially on the upper parts of the river.

The good news is I got much better casting the fly with a shooting head as I dind't loose any good casting time by playing with salmons :)

The Vision's fly fishing jacket I bought this spring was very good and I can honestly recommend it to anybody.

Fishing season ... argh, I wanna start it already!

This seems to be the 3rd summer in row that I don't start my fishing season in Kiiminkijoki but I have to wait until my summer break when I get to go to Utsjoki. This is my last week at work and on Tuesday next week I'll start my fishing season in Utsjoki...either in Utsjoki river or in Vetsijoki river. I've heard that there's quite a lot of salmon at least on Teno river. Aslakki says the salmon is climbing up to trees already :) (see http://www.tenojoki.fi/tenopaasivut/aslak/)

I've made only moderate equipment purchases for this season. I got me a fly fishing jacket and a Guideline's shooting head from Perhokolmio. The line I got is Power Taper DDC Connect Intermediate for one hand rods. It'll be interesting to see how it works...I'll try to report it here. The jacket is the long version of the Vision FlyWater jacket. Should be ok but if not I'll definitely report it here.

House deal done

A quick update on the house matter. We did get into agreement with the seller on the house I mentioned in my previous post so I'll be moving from the northern side of the city of Oulu to the the southern side. I'm so excited about moving to a new house...we've already started packing stuff and today we need to go select the tiles for kitchen.

Buying a new house

I've been lazy on blogging for quite some time already. Somehow Facebook takes quite a lot of my "online life energy" and it's hard to find time and energy to do blogging. Twittering I've almost totally given up on because of Facebook.

I've been up to so many things since the last time I wrote something here but the biggest thing is that we've sold our house and are looking for a new one now. We're already in kind of hurry as we should move out from our current house by the end of July. I've made an offer on a new house (literally new...it's supposed to be ready by 3rd week of July) yesterday and now waiting for the response from the seller...should know something by tomorrow.

It certainly isn't the best possible time to be upgrading a house right now as the interests are high and still going further up. Also it is expected that the house/apartment prices are going to go down in Finland. But we made the decision to sell our current house a bit before all the signs of the economy turned to red. But as a wise man once said, let's hope for the best and fear for the worst :)

New fishing story in the works

Today I decided that it's time for me to write a new fishing story. It'll take at least a few days until it's done and I'm ready to publish it here. Again I'm going to write it in Finnish like I did with the previous story called Uni because it's too difficult for me to write stories in English. This story is going to be about ice-fishing. It'll include description of beautiful snowy landscape of the fells of Utsjoki and - of course - fishing action.
I can't wait for the story to materialize through my fingers on the keyboard :)

Bad luck with weather

I was @ Ruka, Kuusamo again last week with my family. On Saturday the weather was great, -4 C, sun shining and no wind, and the slopes were in a very good shape. It totally looked like my luck with weathers had changed. But then on Sunday the weather was terrible, wind blowing so that the bubble ski lifts had to be closed and it was totally impossible to glide the east side slopes as the wind was freezing your face and throwing ice on it. So we were forced to stay on the west side slopes which was good in the sense that now the whole family is experienced on skiing/snow boarding on black slopes :)

As a summary of the snowboarding this season I have to say that I learned to do it better than before as I have never done that as much as this winter. My son learned to ski very well, he's doing great carving turns even on the steep slopes. My daughter also learned really snowboard. When the season started she was still sliding sideways and only doing the easiest blue slopes. Now she can easily do the red slopes and somehow handle even black ones. My wife got also better with carvers.
As total I was on snowboard on 9 days, 8 in Ruka and 1 in Iso-Syöte. Of these days the weather was nice only on one, last Saturday. In addition the weather was decent on one or two days but 6 days out of 9 it was lousy. I experienced raining, heavy snowing, horrible winds, very cold temperature and all sorts of mixes of these. I hope the luck with weather is better next winter.

First day in a new job

The first day in a new job is now pretty much behind. The morning was pretty busy with meetings until 1 pm. After that I've been trying to learn stuff by reading...there's so much to read!!!

I must say that I'm looking forward on how the new job will turn out and how the whole service business that Nokia is now on will evolve for Nokia. It is very interesting to be part of building new business for a giant company like Nokia. This is not the first time for me though as previously I was part of the team that introduced Nokia Internet Tablets. That was a wonderful learning experience and I had the greatest job of managing partnering for internet applications.
Before that I was part of a team that brought SIP technology to Nokia S60 handsets. Again there my responsibility was partnering related as I managed the S60 SDK SIP plug-in introduction to developers (well, Forum Nokia guys took care of the last mile but anyway) and managed an early access developer program for ISVs.

Now it's time to go home and let the learning of the first day in the new job to sink in...