Johannes Bulfin looks out upon a frozen landscape and counts the seconds until he can fish again.
The time has come at last. A time I knew would come but deeply hoped against hope that it still would not. The ice has finally set over southern Finland’s lakes and Baltic inlets; it will not release them again until April.
As a result of this harsh affliction I have withdrawn into the virtual world of online fly fishing ezines, articles, blogs and forums. They make for interesting reading and generate many questions and ideas but to be honest it just makes me want to go fishing even more! In Ireland at least I had the option of pike and stocked rainbow fisheries to get me through the winter, and they had always tided me over the dark winter months just fine.
This is in danger of turning into one big drawn out moan…. But I mean in some places in Ireland salmon fishing opens on the 1st of January! And trout on the 15th February! They must have a pretty low pain threshold when it comes to staying away from their fishing.
So in an attempt to combat the winter blues I broke out the fly tying vice and materials today; Christmas Eve it is in fact. A couple of years of neglect had certainly had a dramatic impact on my tying skills! Whip finishing turned into an exercise of anger management as the thread slipped off, unravelled, pinched feathers or simply snapped. Basically it did nothing to soothe my aching desire to go fishing. The end result was in fact deemed to be unpresentable to a trout, or any other fish for that matter, therefore I turned them into a pair of ear rings! Try to get your head around that then; I deemed that the concoction of fur, feathers and beads was not worthy to be presented to a creature with a brain the size of a pea, lives in water and eats snails, worms, raw fish and flies. However it was more than adequate to be worn and flaunted upon the ears of a beautiful young lady at various social occasions. I can’t explain it (in a reasonable and logical way at least!). And no: I will not include a picture of them, besides they are gift wrapped already.
So fly tying isn’t exactly doing it for me either, but I’ll persevere at it because it is something I wish to improve at. Perhaps this is the time of year to reflect upon the past season? I had a great year's fishing, no doubt about that but instead of looking back I choose to look ahead to what the next season might hold.
Not my toes by the way, just for the record!
So many hopes and plans, so little time and money! There is one trip though that I will endeavour to finally make a reality, come next July. That is a float trip through Finnish lapland in pursuit of artic grayling, char, trout and pike whilst simultaneously offfering my body up as a sacrifice to the vulture-esque swarms of mosquitoes!
A vast landscape of desolate, treeless tundra cut by ribbons of rushing rivers and chequered by a mosaic of nameless ponds and lakes. This scene is spread out underneath a sun that never sets. It certainly is the kind of fairytale landscape that has the ability to keep me dreaming, planning, hoping and believing through this winter.
Looking forward to drifting a dry fly over one of these guys again.
To read more from Johannes please visit his excellent blog Road To Water