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Paradise Was Close

Our January 2001 contribution from Ulf Borjesson

"I managed to hook the first two grayling and suddenly everything was alright. I calmed down and started to fish steady and without tangling the leader." In this first article by Ulf Borjesson, he writes about the wonderful grayling fishing on the Gimån in Jämtland in the middle of Sweden.

One summer some six years ago three friends and I drove 2200km, one way, from Göteborg in the south west of Sweden to Masi in the northernmost part of Norway. It took us 22 hours, non stop. We stayed there for 10 days and fished for trout, char, grayling and whitefish. The fishing was reasonably good and the cream of the event was a 7lb+ brown trout that Johan caught at two in the morning on a sedge pupa. It tasted heavenly! Lars filleted it and Patrik cooked it. I just ate and enjoyed.

We waded and fished the big river Altaelva and some smaller rivers in the area, the troutfishing was good but the grayling were not really what we had hoped for. They were there in numbers but not in size, the biggest one was caught by Lars whilst doing some midnight float-tubing in a slow part of the river. It measured 44 cm. A nice sized fish but nothing special. So what do you do after 10 days of serious fishing, out at 8 in the evening, fish until 8 in the morning and fly tying and "socialising" in between? We went fishing.

Johan had fished the River Gimån in Jämtland, a county more or less in the geographical centre of Sweden, and as we were driving south he phoned Lars-Åke Olsson who is the river keeper and has a lease on a part of the river called Idsjöströmmen. Sure enough, he had room for us, in fact we had the beat to ourself for a couple of days. So with two other friends tagging along we headed south. It is some 1400km from Masi to Gimdalen were Lars-Åke and his lovely American wife Jennifer run the fishing and guiding, and we reached the lodgings at one o'clock in the morning on 8 August.

After a good night's sleep we got up at nine and by then Lars-Åke was already there with our tickets and a load of advice. Since Johan was the only one who had fished the river before he took us all down and showed us where and how to fish. He warned us that the fishing was a bit slow, even though the sedge hatches were massive all through the night. We had some sporadic hatches of baetis during the day and some microcaddis but we didn´t really see much fish. Being really "seasoned" fishermen we decided that daytime fishing was probably not a good idea and retreated to food and fly tying up at the lodge.

Lars-Åke had told us of how Idsjöströmmen had been restored after the logging period when all the big rocks were cleaned out of the stream to make the logging easy. All the natural habitat had been more or less devastated and the enthusiasts that started the restoration had faced what looked like a hopeless task. Today, thanks to the hard work and a catch and release policy, Idsjöströmmen is helping to supply a large part of Gimån with big grayling.

You are allowed to kill fish in Idsjöströmmen - one fish over 45cm per visit - that means that whether you stay two weeks or one day you still get to take just one fish. Almost nobody does though, and thanks to the good guidance of Lars-Åke and Jennifer, most fish are released in a correct way and survive.

That evening our anticipation was high!

We got into the river and started fishing a bit downstream from the bridge that marks the upper limit of the beat. It was around 7.30 pm and there were a slow hatch of mayflies and sedges, some red spinners were dancing over the water and if it hadn´t been for the mosquitoes...... There was the odd rise, some of them looked like good sized fish and we were spreading out with slightly frantic, stumbling steps in the waist-deep water. Some of the others, probably Johan and Patrik, had already caught a few fish and I was tying on a new fly after having made just a few casts over some fish without any response. Nerves! And before it really had begun.

Fishing slightly up and across with a cdc sedge pupa I managed to hook the first two grayling and suddenly everything was alright. I calmed down and started to fish steady and without tangling the leader.

After two hours or so we decided to compare notes so we gathered around the fire and had some coffee. Everyone had caught fish, sizes varied but a few 40cm+ grayling had been released and we all agreed that it had kept getting better as the sun dropped. One or two had fished spent spinners, another a Klinkhammer someone used a super pupa and yet another a deerhair pupa. There was still no one method that seemed more efficient. One of the bigger grayling had been caught on a doublelegs nymph but besides that one, everyone had fished with surface flies.

Looking out over the water we suddenly noticed that the sedges were hatching in force and the heavy rises just 50m downstream from our campfire lured us back out into the river.

> Continue to part two