FishTwits Blog

06-26-09

Midsummer at Sjöberga The fish that got away

Last Weekend was Midsummer, sadly marking the middle of summer and ruining my illusion of its beginning.  In Sweden however Midsummer is a jubilant day perhaps one of the biggest party days in Sweden up there with new years. The tradition in Sweden is to spend the day outdoors and sing and dance around a big phallic symbol dressed with flowers. The day is yet another excuse to drink too much and eat nothing but herring (strangely enough every Swedish event involves eating herring). I also believe that this might possibly be the day that all Swedish people are conceived.

Anyway for midsummer I was invited to the country side of Sweden to a friend’s stuga (a country house). The country house was at Sjöberga about 20 minutes from Höör. It seemed like this cottage was in the middle of nowhere as we drove through the endless forest on dirt roads. We finally got to the place to discover the cottage overlooked a beautiful lake. My first thought was I wish I had brought my fishing pole but to my surprise after exploring the tool shed of the stuga we found some ancient fishing poles. These things must have been sitting in the shed for years at first I was not sure if the fishing line were spider webs or actual line. My next thought was how could I justify to the rest of the group to get away and fish. At first it didn’t seem like I would be able to get some time to go fishing but after a couple hours of drinking and singing people started to get hungry and as they started to prepare the food I started suggesting how great it would be to have some fresh fish to eat. Of course everyone loved the idea and demanded that I had to go catch some now. So I headed down with one of the guys, Nikolaj and my girlfriend to catch some fish.

Heading down to the lake we came across several people already fishing the area who greeted us friendly saying the fish were not bighting. Apparently they have been there for hours with no luck. We however were more confident and told them we had a secret weapon and showed them our great fishing poles, they laughed and wished us luck. We continued to walk around the lake to find a nice spot. We ended up finding a dilapidated dock half sunken half afloat and decided it was a great place to use our matching poles.

I first started by teaching my girlfriend how to fish showing her how to cast. She did a couple casts and became quite bored and disappointed that she didn’t catch a fish with her three casts and decided to go back to the rest of the group. Now it was just Nikolaj and myself. About 15 minutes more go by and we start to see fish jumping everywhere. Next thing we know we’re hooked up and pulling in our first Pike.  We re super excited now thinking that we can have a fish feast for dinner now. We get hooked up again and it must be a big one the pole is bending all over the place. Suddenly however I hear a big snap and I see half of the pole fly out to the lake cutting the line as it flies away. I couldn’t believe it the old ancient pole snapped under the weight of the fish! After that there was not much we could do so we had to head back with our one fish. The other fishermen were really surprised that we caught a fish especially since we had only been there for about 45 minutes. We told them where we were and suggested they go there. They actually two hours later came by our place to show us a monster perch they caught. All in all a very nice experience I will definitely come back more prepared and catch the fish that got away.