Hardangervidda 21/7-26/7 2009

My first trip to Hardangervidda which is the largest national park in Norway. We were a group of 10 people of whom I only knew one beforehand. That was Inge who I met in Los Roques in January earlier this year. Hardangervidda is a high mountain area where you are not allowed to use any kind of motor, so trekking is the way to move around. After a three hour car trip from Oslo we went on a 45 minutes boat trip and we could start walking to our destination.

Inge – also known as Dr. Rasmussen – in his out of the ordinary trekking suit, not like most Norwegians.

 

The area has some fantastic views, here you can see an ice cap in the background. The group was a very mixed bag as there was an evenly distribution of the sexes in contradiction to the normal fishing trips, which was nice and a mix of four nationalities.

 

The Flamish twins – Agusta from the Netherlands and Afge from Belgium

We started walking uphill first in a forest and later we ascended above the tree border to the plateau. As I am not used to trek I have say that after 5 hours of walking in rough terrain with a 23 kg back pack I was worn. I think everyone else felt the same. The first night we stayed in a hut Lagarås 30 minutes from our final destination. Next mourning we walked the last part and put up our camp close to a hut of stone with an oven inside which should prove very useful as the weather was quite cold and wet most of the time.

Our main fishing spot was located a mile from our camp and was a very nice stream between two lakes. The stream was with some heavy current and then 5 -6 pools. Places where the streams enters and leaves the lakes should be hot spots especially in the evenings but we did not see or catch anything in these places, why I can not figure out. Further away we could fish another stream between lakes but this was a typically dry fly stream and unfortunately the weather conditions were not for the dry fly as no insects hatched except for a few short periods of times.

 

We caught quite a lot of fish, but most were very small in the 20 – 25 cm range.

 

A days catch – many small fish but very nice for the frying pan.

 

There were also bigger fish and my very first fish – the only one on the first day- proved to be the largest on the trip. It was a very nice 1.33 kg (Morten brought a digital scale) app. 48 cm brown trout taken on a black woolly bugger with rubber legs.

I am too big (195 cm) for fishing pictures, they always look small. Or I simply do not catch big enough fish 😦

 

On day two Morten got this 900 gram trout. Morten is a convinced spinning fisher, but I think that he will admit that on this trip the fly was more efficient than the lure.

 

A 41 cm 800 grams brown trout in the net. As most fish it was taken on a streaking caddis. It was fish number 19 on an evening trip to the stream where all the first 18 were small fish.

Some of the bigger fish were graved and that was very delicious.

 

Others were pan fried – also a delicacy

 

The last day we could fish with dry flies and Klinkhammer proved the be the pattern of the day as many other times. Inge celebrated the dry fly day by wearing this special bow tie! When do Simms come up with something like that in Goretex?

Morten, Inge and I were the experienced fishermen in the group but everyone wanted to try fishing and everyone actually caught several trouts so in that respect it was a success. The weather could have been nicer to us especially to the dry fly fishers but we all had a great trip despite or because of the hard work we had to put into the trekking so maybe next year we will come back and get the really big ones.