A love story for the haters

I am in love.

I’ve been in love since I was about three years old, or rather it was  a fling until I was seven, then I f ell in love for real and it is a life long love story.

I think about my love every day, when I wake in the morning and when I go to sleep. I look at photos of my love, and long til we meet next time.

No, I don’t have a trout stream behind my house so that I can fish everyday after work.
No, am not single without kids so that I can just drop everything and go fishing whenever I want.
And no, I can’t go fishing every weekend like I want to.
And no I can’t go fishing all summer.
And no I can’t afford to go away abroad on 3-4 weeks fishing trips.

Do this mean I don’t qualify as a real fisherman? Do this mean that I don’t count and that my opinions don’t count? Does it really mean that I am to be excluded from some sort of fishing community? I sure hope not.

Do I wish I could do all those things I can’t? Of course, but my life situation don’t allow it. My kids mean everything to me, and I wouldn’t change this for the world but that doesn’t mean I don’t suffer from not being able to do what I love the most; fishing.

I’ve seen people start fishing and then after 4-5 years go on to try something else. I started fishing when I was 3 years old, and frankly I have gotten to love it more and more the older I get. Last year I had 26 fishing days, at least that average a day of fishing every other week, not close to some people but it was what I could manage. Does that make me a fake fly fisherman? Is it only the amount of fishing days that will judge as a proof if you love fly fishing or not?

I love fly fishing, I love the way of the /:Fly:/ and I love the camaraderie that I get from my true fishing friends.

Last but not least, I love fly tying too. I really do, but it is nothing but a bleak imposer when it is compared to the love I have for the fishing. Don’t you forget that.

I am in love, and I suffer because it has been two months since I last met with the love of my life.

For all the non believers and haters: I got nothing but love for you.

Summary of 2011 – the turn around year

If there is one thing that is a sort of tradition in my blogging it has to be the yearly summary. A reflection of the year that went by and the events that passed in it. I really like this myself because it gives me time to reflect and remember. Something of a closure of the year.

Let’s just start with establishing the fact that 2010 was a terrible year. A lot of bad things happened and eventhough there were just a few really bad, like the passing of my mother in law, things sort of pilled up and made 2010 a year that I think I am gonna remember along with 2007 as a couple of the worst years in my life. So it was with with quite a lot of anticipation I gor rid of that year and stepped into 2011 with hopes and dreams, among other things Grayling Dreams.

Yes, because what I had started planning for real during 2010 came to life early 2011, my own distribution company that I’ve been running now for a full year beside my regular day job. And in January I was just starting and didn’t quite know what to expect, but I knew that I had some really interesting products with me that I was gonna take to some of the dealers that I knew well and who knew me. There were a lot of things to learn and to draw experience from early on, but I set a goal to have delivered products to 10 dealers by the end of the year.

January was also very much about winter, the coldest and snowiest winter in a hundred years. It had started already in mid-november and didn’t actually go away until late march. This was very hard on all of us who are fly fishermen, but for me it also prevented my local fly fishing for pike that I during normal conditions would be able to do most of the winter. For my family it was also a hard time because my fiancée was still very much suffering from the serious leg fracture she had conducted back in november and spent most of her time in a wheel chair. Getting out in four feet of snow was not the easiest of task.

We tried to make the best of it, tried to be out with the kids in the snow as much as we could and also got visits from both my brother and sister and their families a couple of times early in the year. But all I wanted was for the winter to end. I tied quite a lot of flies in January and also did a lot of experimeting with lightboxes and my camera. This period of the year often results in a new pattern or two for the comming fishing and show season, this year it was very much the “Still got the blues for you” baitfish that was the newest and hottest from my vise, at least in my own opinion.

As February came I started to plan for the coming big show in Sweden, the Swedish fly fishing fair in March and started to tie up a few flies for that. Winter was still at large and it was really getting hard not having fished since November but we began to slowly see an end to the dark times.

Work was hard and I found myself being tired and moody most of the time, as so many times before my fantastic kids were my saviors and kept me floating above everything else. I keep thinking to myself that no matter what disappointments life  throw at me I will be okay as long as I have my kids with me. I will never ever let them down because they are so much bigger than anything else in my life.

March came and it was time for the highlight show of the year, the one that kinds kicks off the season; The Swedish fly fishing fair. This year was probably just as fun as always, for me it was extra exciting because I was tying with a lot of the products that I now was distributing trough my company and at the same time my friends at Stockholms flugfiskecenter had a big booth there selling all the stuff too.

It was successful for both of us, but the fair it self was struggling having failed to attract any of the big brands like LOOP, Guideline and Vision. I got to meet old friends like Chris Reeves and Simon Graham who had the misfortune of catching some kind of stomach bug during the fair but also got to meet new friends, and a living legend in A.K. Best. I think that was one of the highlights for me this year getting to meet him, watch him tie and chat a little with him. A very nice man and very funny.

The best thing with March was that I finally got to get out and fish, this years premier happened on the 28th of March and it was a little bit too early. A lot of ice still in most bays when me and my friend Magnus got out. It didn’t really matter, I got to spend a day in my home waters that I had missed so much and got to swing a rod for a day, it was a start of the first real fishing season for me in over two years. Because even if I had fished more during 2010 than the year before it was still very few days compared to previous years. I got out again ten days after that and caught five pike in an hours fishing and was happy like a tornado on a camping.

Then another week after that it was time for the annual Elmer goes pike trip when my fishing buddies come down to my waters to fly fish for pike for 3-4 days and just have a great time. This year was slightly different though, first of all I started the trip one day early and brought my oldest son Kristoffer with me and secondly we got some very nice company for two days. That extra day with my son was special, very special. I had one clear aim for the day, to get him to catch his first pike. And we succeeded in that, he did catch his first pike, and somehow the circle was closed. I had now taken him to the same spot that my father took me to when I caught my first pike some 30 years ago, and now I have planted the same seed in him. A proud and more happy father I was right there and then trying to hold my tears back when he lifted that little pike with a big grin.

The rest of the trip saw me, Magnus, Anders and Roger fish tough conditions with quite lousy fishing from time to time. We did in the end catch a few pikes but it was a clear set back after seing a clear increase of pike during the last three years. What was fun though was that my friends Marc Fauvet and Jeanette Linnarud came to fish with us for two of the three days. Marc is a great guy, very warm and kind and funny, and Jeannette is  equally warm and fun so it was just a very pleasant time we got to have together. Too bad that the fishing was not at its best but that’s fishing, you never really know. Also it would have helped it my boat had been in better condition so that we could have traveled faster and fished more spots but it was okay anyway.

I got to fish three more times that spring, with mixed result, the fishing was actually at its best in early may when I got down to fish with my brother and my uncle for the first time in over 10 years. I regret that I didn’t get out more in may because I think I  could have had really good pike fishing based on how the fishing progressively got better and better in April.

Things were looking lighter now, winter was gone, I had fished quite a lot and I could almost smell summer in the air and with it came the dream of the north, small streams with crystal clear waters and dry fly fishing for trout and grayling. Yes, I was about to go to my first real summer trip since 2008. As I said I’d had two years with not much fishing at all, and my anticipation for comming up to the land of the midnight sun was high to say the least. Camping, fishing, hiking and just being with friends, nothing come close to it in my book.

April and May had seen the start of a very turbulent time at my regular job, global restructuring was at hand and there was confusing and a lot of uncertainty for me and my colleagues, something that would gett progressivly worse during the year. But I was not too concerend about that just then because I had my long summer vacation and my northen trip to look forward to.

Before it was time to go away I needed to tie flies for my own box for the first time in a long time, so I started this project on the  blog where I went from a totally empty box and filled it with dry fly patterns for the trip. It was so much fun to do this, and also so much to share it on the blog. Classic patterns like the Klinkhammer and red tag was mixed with some of my own like the SRM emerger and the ant.

My long summer vacation started in mid june. It was supposed to have started with me goin to the Brittish fly fair but again I had to cancel this great event. 2010 I had to cancel because of the accident with my fianceé and it was partly because of this I had to cancel again. We had suffered echonomically from the injury with very little income on her part for months and I found myself in a position where I had to chose wether to go to the show in England or go to the fishing trip later that summer. I chosed fishing.

I got to fish a day at the Tiveden fishery in mid june too, a great day out with friends I hadn’t met for a long time. The weather was lousy, and I didn’t catch any fish but it was still a great day. Something of a preview of the days to come later that summer. While waiting for that I spent all my time with the family, enjoying summer weather with swimming and exploring and just being outside. It was a great time, litteraly no clouds on my sky at that point.

And then it was time finally for the summer trip to Dellik river, the Crystal river as we came to call it. It was a week that had all that I had dreamed of and then some more. Some might have seen the fishin we had being not so good but I was happy with it anyway, I didn’t catch that 3 pound trout that I had hope to but I got to fish some fantastic water and catch some amazingly beautiful trout on dry fly.

Here’s all post that talks about this trip for you to read more if you want:

The flight to crystal river

The crystal river

Fishing Lappland summer 2011 (day 1-3)

Fishing Lappland 2011 (Day 4-6)

http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii38/ulf_hagstrom/Delikk/?albumview=slideshow

This photo somehow summarize it all for me, a fantastic spot in a fantastic river together with fantastic friends.

When I got back home again it was of course with a strong loonging to get back up there but also with a feeling of feeling stronger, more confident and more whole as a person again. This was exactly what I had been missing and the short two day trip the year before had not been close to enough. I won’t go as far as say that I was a changed man but I was more close to the man I am supposed to be.

Summer went past quickly and work got hectic all autumn. The uncertainty that we had during the spring culminated and things got very hard on a lot of us in September and October and I felt really bad from time to time. Eventually it turned out good and I got a new management position at work but the process here was very rough and not handled very well.

But apart from that I had a good autumn. Grayling Dreams business had been slow all summer but from September and onwards alot of things have sort of fallen into place, we reached our goal of 10 dealers wich in itself feels amazing.

Fishing was also good. From last week in August I got out once a week for six consecutive weeks pike fishing, and the fishing was really good from time to time too! A took advantage more of living so close to the baltic sea and went out on more 1-2 hour sessions. As october came I found myself so busy with all things so I didn’t manage a fishing day again until early December.

August also so a start to this, the way of the /:Fly:/ blogg project. I had been following some new (to me) fishin bloggers during the summer and found that I was impressed by them for how they blogged and the way the kept a theme to their bloggin in a way that I had never managed. So I decided to start from scratch and start a new blogg. For the first two months of it I kept a feroicous tempo blogging but it has been less and less as other things have kept me busy.

In november I took my other big trip of the year, to Somerset in New Jersey USA to tie along with ten other Swedish fly tyers at the International Fly tying Symposium! I had been wanting to go to this event for many years but hadn’t had the money to go there but I finally managed to get over with my friends and it was a great event! The best thing had to be meeting a lot of friends that I had only known from the internet over the year but now got the chance to see in real life. People like Bob Mead, Martin Bawden, Dave Schmezer, Bruce Corwin, Lyle Graf, Gary Borger, Chuck Furminsky, Mike Schmidt, Pat Cohen and many, many more made the four days over there  great!

November and December has been good, warm, light and with no snow. It looks like it is gonna be a mild winter this year. I am already looking forward to fishing in January in February. Maybe even some Sea trout fishing this year. December also saw me go to a small show in Uppsala hosted by my good friend Niklas Dahlin for the second year in a row. I really like this even, it is small but still very well visited and with a lot of great people attending and visiting.

As I write this on the last day of 2011 it is with joy I look back at most things this year. I think that when I get old I am gonna look back to this year as the year where a lot of projects took up, a year when I tried to juggle with a whole lot of things and pulled it off. Yes there are things that I still regret 2011, people that I still miss so much everyday, but apart from that this year has been the best in a long time. And the best feeling right now is that everythin points towards 2012 being an even better year. 23 fishing days in 2011 might not seem much to some of you but it was the most I’ve had for quite some time, my new years resolution is that I am gonna have even more days 2012!

Thank you for reading this and supporting me this year!

The ones closest

My oldest son Kristoffer said to me this evening: “dad, it’s not important to have cool looking shoes. The important thing is that you aren’t without shoes”.

Sometimes I think I might have done something right after all

It’s been a good weekend

Any weekend that kicks off with fishing, and good fishing aswell, like this one did is bound to be a good weekend. Yesterday I took my kids to the airport, after a request from my oldest son Kristoffer, to look at big aeroplanes and watch as the took off and landed. It was really fun for them and when they are happy you know that I am happy to.

Today’s been more of a lazy day, just being at home taking it easy and enjoying the late summer weather with being outside a lot. This evening I am gonna be interviewed by Jesper Hultqvist at Swedish pocasting “Flugfiskeradion” (fly fishing radio) and after that I was planing on starting some of the flies that I want to bring with me to the Somerset show in November.

I’ve also been able to try some new really good beverages this weekend, two Imperial Stout (Yeti, yummy!!), one Imperial porter (Gonzo!) and three different IPA’s. Those included two brand new (for me) Danish produces IPA’s which I enjoyed a lot, the third one was the familiar but oh so good Hercules Double IPA from Great Divide Brewery.

One month old!

Time flies when you have fun, at least that’s what people say. I think that I’ve found a good rhythm and that I have come off to a good start with a good mix of rambling, fishing reports, fly tying articles and more. For the observant one you might have notices that most of my posts come at roughly the same time at the day, this is because I often bring the laptop with me when putting my youngest to sleep. I’ll be sitting in the downstair living room next door to his room and this is a very nice time of the day when I can sit by myself for 30-50 minutes or so and put down thoughts that have been running trough my head during the day.

I hope you have enjoyed the first month of The way of the /:Fly:/, there will be more months, hopefully years, and if you want me to change anything, add something, or have any special request just let me know!

Here’s some stats for you!

Number of posts: 91
Number of pages: 6
Number of categories: 17
Subscribers: 5

Views total: 6257
Most view on one day: 463
Top referrer: Facebook
Most vied post: Last of the mohicans (Step by step) (298 views)
Comments on posts: 91
Top commenter: Erin Block (thank you dear Erin)
Number of shares: 13 (10 on Facebook and 3 on Twitter)

And just to celebrate this past month I think we need to start touching a little more on my third interest (after fly fishing and beers) which is music. So here’s a little example for you, crank it up and sing along! 🙂

I am a thief?

Apparently I am currently being accused of being a thief. Yep, it is dead serious and very saddening and annoying.

In the German bi-lingual magazine Fly and Tie I had an article on a foam mayfly called “The last of the mohicans” which of course was a direct referral towards the classic Mohican Mayfly pattern developed by Oliver Edwards, the pattern that my foam mayfly was totally a variant of. The intro of the text I wrote for the article was completely devoted to describing how I got inspired by that pattern from Mr Edwards and giving him total credit for everything.

Now, when the article got in print I discovered to my surprise that this text had been edited out for the final article. Even though I  got annoyed with this I thought that clearly everyone will understand that this is just a simpler variant of the original OE pattern. Well that is not the case. On june 6th I sent this to the editor:

“…I was a little concerned though that you chosed to leave out all of the part about the pattern being a variation of the Oliver Edwards original pattern. I would very much liked that to have remained. “

I have always given full credit to anyone that I have gotten inspired to when tying flies, and I have always been very humble about the fact that very few of the patterns we create are totally unique, we always borrow things from other flies and other tiers and it is important to give credit back to those tiers.

I am not gonna be called a thief because a sloppy editor decided on his own to remove some of my text, so tonight I am publishing to full original article complete with step by step instructions here so that the record gets set straight.

Everyone has a part to play

Catch and release, off course we do it! Do a google search on catch and release and you will find literary  thousands of people writing about it and a lot more people swearing by it. It seems most people these days understand the value of release all or some of your catch to maintain a good population of fish in the waters we fish. But do we understand the echo system that we help preserve?

Just one thing though, this is not another one of those articles that are to discuss the ethics on Catch and release, or “Limit your kill” or “Limit your catch” or “Take only what you can eat” or any other concept that seems to have emerged in the on going debate on Catch and release. No this is more to understand that every fish in every echo system is valuable, every fish count.

This past summer I saw a couple of very terrifying examples of how people still are surprisingly narrow minded in their thoughts. People who would gladly confess to killing every Pike they catch in their trout waters because they “steal the trot”. Now, I can comprehend that some people like to fish for certain species of fish, I really can. But I think that people need to be more enlighten on the how the different species function in an ecosystem.

As long as we are not talking about an intrusive species that are put there unnatural (like for example certain types of crayfish has been) either by human or in any other way then every fish in a water has its role to play in the echo system. So if there are a sudden increase or decrease of any species or any particular size of one species too that will have effect on the echo system and the water in which the live.

Clearly there are people who gives it their best to exterminate for example pike from trout waters because they want more trout there.

Narrow minded? Well, yes.

But, let’s play with the thought that they would succeed with it, that all the pike from their precious trout water was caught and killed on shore.

What would happen with the echo system in that water? At worst? First there will be more mid size and large trout, since those are the normal target for pikes. And as soon as there are more big trouts there are gonna be many more predatory fish; hunting and eating smaller fish instead of insects. One of their basic food source would of course be small trout and trout fry along with small bottom dwelling fish like Sculpin. Now one the main sources of food for trout fry and other fry is different plankton. Now there are different typed of plankton, one of the most common is Phytoplankton which if they get to occur in to large numbers can cause murky waters and in worst case algal blooms and in the end can drain an entire water from livehood and oxygen. This is worst case of course, but if you were to kill all pike and there would be an abnormal growth of large and mid size trouts which would devour too much of fry and small fish then it is a fact that the Phytoplankton will increase and the risk of major effects on your water will occur! We often think of over-fertilization as the only source of this but disturbances in the echo system can have just as big effects.

Another worst case scenario would of course be that since there are so many larger trout around there will be VERY hard for fry to survive to become large enough to no longer be food source for the bigger fish. Eventually, this could lead to that the population will diminish to only a few fish and in the end, no trout at all in the water?

You want more examples? Are you a fact of tests geek like me? Okay, here you go with a really good example from my home waters The Baltic sea that again shows how important fish of all sizes are in the echo system (*
Scientists at the Swedish board of fishery couldn’t really understand why there was such big amount of algal bloom in areas that was not affected by over-fertilization as much as other areas. They eventually conducted a field experiment together with scientists at Stockholm university outside the island of Askö here in Sweden.

Bigger sections of the bottom were sealed off so that bigger fishes couldn’t enter while other equally big sections was only roped up for reference. The study clearly showed that the sections that the bigger fish was not entering grew MUCH more alga much quicker. The reason for this is that the main eaters of alga is shrimps and small snails. Now in the sections where the big fish was closed out the small fish ate the shrimps and snails to such extend that they no longer fed on the alga in the way that was needed to keep it in place. In a normal echo system there is a healthy distribution of fish in all sizes.

The responsible scientist Alfred Sandström says:

“- You cannot forget the fish when you are managing an echo system, because it is all connected. Without good management of the fish the problem with over-fertilization can get much worse.”

Now mother nature has taken a serious beating over the last hundred years or so, we humans have really put her to a real strain and there are a lot of waters like my own precious Baltic sea who are in real bad shape today. A lot of lakes suffer from sourness and other environmental issues. But hey, she is a tough chick, she has ways of recovering if only we can change our way of treating her. What she don’t need is us doing stupid things just because we want to “have more” of our favorite species.

As you fish a water you become part of that waters echo system, think about that.

(* the entire article on this study are to be found here, but sorry only in Swedish: https://sottosalt.fiskeriverket.se/artiklar/nystudievisarpafiskarsbetydelseformangdenalger.5.28d9b61d126d6846f2980009990.html

I had plans for today

I had plans for a step-by-step fly tying article tonight. But I feel like crap, been sick all evening and it feels like I’ve gotten a fever too. Bummer. Oh well there’s always tomorrow. G’night!

A sense of coherence

Do you have a sense of coherence? Do /:Fly:/ fishermen in general have a stronger sense of coherence than other people? I believe so.

Let’s start from the top. The “Sense of coherence” is a theoretical model presented by Aaron Antonovsky an Israeli American sociologist and academician whose work concerned the relationship between stress, health and well-being. Antonovsky claimed that a person is never either completely healthy or completely sick, instead we move between the poles healty and sick and it is the amount of sense of coherence that goverens which pole we are most attracted to.

Without getting in to too much psychological theoretical nonsense the Sense of coherence is a persons way to find meaningfulness in every thing that happens in life, to find coherence in every action and reaction. Basically the model concentrates on three things:

• Comprehensibility: a belief that things happen in an orderly and predictable fashion and a sense that you can understand events in your life and reasonably predict what will happen in the future.
• Manageability: a belief that you have the skills or ability, the support, the help, or the resources necessary to take care of things, and that things are manageable and within your control.
• Meaningfulness: a belief that things in life are interesting and a source of satisfaction, that things are really worth it and that there is good reason or purpose to care about what happens.*

The third element is by far the most important according to Antonovsky. The more meaningfulness a person feels the healthier he/she will be and feel. And also all of this will make it easier for you to handle challenges in life and being able to handle challenges will in turn make your sense of coherence even stronger making you generally healthier!

I am not one for generalizing but I do feel strongly that /:Fly:/ fishermen and women in general have a stronger sense of coherence. Maybe it is because we often spend more time in untouched nature, making it easier for us to see how we fit in in nature. Or maybe it is because we feel a belonging sharing such a deep passion for something with other like minded, and that no matter what crisis will happen in our life we always have the safeness of /:Fly:/ fishing to fall back to?

A friend of mine once said “My early teens was not good and it wasn’t until I found /:Fly:/ fishing that I found a meaning with things”. It might sound weird to people but for many of us life wouldn’t have much meaning if we didn’t get to /:Fly:/ fish. We will always have things to look forward to, trips and days out that will take our mind away from the stress of the squirrel wheel and those trips and days out will also be the “charging of our batteries” that will give us a more positive way to handle they must-dos and stress of the everyday life. We will also have that unique camaraderie and friendship that comes from sharing something so special together.

I am no psychologist, and I have no real proof data to support my theory, just my own sense of coherence and my experience from being around other /:Fly:/ fishermen.

Sense of coherence trough the way of the /:Fly:/

*Source data from Wikipedia

I need your T-shirt!

What more could you possibly wish for your branded T-shirt than for it to be seen on me with a suit jacket in my office!!!! …..eh, well probably a whole lot more but let’s just pretend that you don’t have higher ambitions than that!

Yes sir, this is a roll call to all of the /:Fly:/ fishing community!

As you probably know (yeah, who am I kidding) I have started a series of blog post where I post photos of me running around in the office with fly fishing related t-shirt on called There’s one in every office. Now I don’t have an unlimited amount of /:Fly:/ fishing t-shirts laying around, so eventually I am gonna run out of them!

So that is why I shamelessly want YOU to send me your /:Fly:/ fishing related t-shirt, if you are a manufacturer of /:Fly:/ fishing products, shop owner, blogger, magazine editor or just someone who likes to print /:Fly:/ fishing related clothes then I need your T-shirt! The more rare the better! (Okay, so if you don’t want to send me one for free then second best would be to send me a link to where I can buy it instead!)

The /:Fly:/ revolution will not be on the six o’clock news!