A hike and some fishing: is there a better way to spend a sunny afternoon?

This past Sunday I went hiking and fishing with Gunnar and Gabriele, and Jennifer King, a new post-doc starting at NPI.  Jennifer and I actually met back in 2010 on the NPI cruise I joined.

Gunnar and Gabriele are participating in the Tipp A Topp program, a local program to get people out to hike and be active.  If you complete X out of 20 hikes (X=7,10,15,20) you get a prize.  At the top of each hike is a guest book and a number that you fill out in a book you purchase.

They picked a relatively easy hike this time, but it was also near to some fishing spots so we decided to do both.  The hike was very nice, not too difficult (only 250m elevation gain or so) and quite short (2km).  We added a bit to it on the way back by going around the lake at the top.

After all the hiking, we went for some fishing nearby.  It really did not look promising, but it was another beautiful spot and a gorgeous day so it did not matter that we did not see any fishing jumping. My feet/shoes were quite wet from the hike (was just wearing some sandal style shoes) so I stopped fishing to dry them out.  Gunnar and Gabrielle  kept fishing and all of a sudden Gabrielle had a fish, and a good sized one.  That was exciting.  We fished for a few more hours and kept one more larger fish, both were saithe.  We caught many smaller saithe, they seemed to just be hanging out offshore near some weeds, and there were some smaller minnows around so perhaps they were hunting.  It was pretty exciting.

Well here are more pictures of the hike since I did not take any pictures while fishing or watching fishing.

Fishing from Shore: Not as easy as from a boat!

I am behind on writing blog posts, luckily it's been awhile since I have backed up my data and since the scripts read from the folder I work in, I can't work in that folder without causing some problems, so I will take a short break (luckily I wrote a Mac Automator script that does synchronous backups instead of just copying the entire directory each time).

So two weekends ago, Gunnar and I decided that we wanted to do some fishing.  I was only half serious at first, but the more we talked about it, the more it sounded like fun.  So on the Saturday Gunnar and I bought fishing rods and some lures at the Co-Op, a grocery/everything store somewhat like Walmart.  The stuff was even on sale (40%off!).

So on Sunday, Gunnar, Gabby and I went to Hella, a well known local fishing spot. Here the fjord is quite narrow as there is a small island in the middle of it.  Because it narrows, there are strong currents and this apprently makes the fishing good.

When we arrived you could not see many fish but after an hour or so suddenly the water looked like it was boiling because of all the mackerel flopping around.  That said they often did not bite our lures, maybe we were using the wrong ones or the wrong size.  Gunnar and I lost a couple lures to the weeds but did pull in some fish.  However, we really did not know how big they should be before we kept them so we probably put back at least one or two that we could have kept.  In the end we only had the one fish to take home, but it was tasty.

Lucky for Gunnar and I, Gunnar's wife Gabrielle is not squeamish and was willing to clean the fish for us.  We both can do it but I at least find it tough.

Holy Mackerel! and cod!

Maybe you guessed from the title, but I went fishing this weekend, twice, and with great success.

Harvey and Angelika were back from their hiking holiday and we had some sunny breaks.

The weather had been pretty rainy and windy last week, but on Saturday evening, the weather cleared up a bit and we decided to go fishing.

We did not go very far from Skulsfjord, and went near a small island in a fjord.  One one side of the island the ground below drops quite quickly and we thought we'd try fishing along the drop as our boat drifted over it.

I cannot remember the last time I went fishing, but it has been awhile, and it has been much longer since I have actually caught something, actually for all I know, I never have. So maybe it was beginners luck, or maybe just Harvey's expertly chosen location but we brought up 15kg of fish, mostly cod.  Harvey was fishing shallow with a rod, and I wish fishing near the bottom with a line with multiple hooks on it.

After just a few minutes, I had a bite, and up came this cod.  I was pretty excited! OKAY! Great!, but Harvey wanted his freezer filled so back to work I went.

My first fish and cod!

 A couple minutes later (at most) I had another bite, and it felt much heavier and stronger...I was excited, was it a much bigger cod, or something else..

Turns out it was just 3 cod, just 3.  SWEET! Okay, well if it keeps going like this, maybe we will fill Harvey's freezer, but surely it can't, it must just be beginners luck I thought.

Just a couple minutes later....note there are three!!, that's right 3!!! fish.

A little more time and more fish. Man this is my kind of fishing.  I do distinctly remember fishing once for hours and hours on a lake and not catching a thing, but this, this I like.

After just a couple hours we had 8 cod, and 3 coal fish, about 15kg (including heads but no guts).
Harvey really did not get much chance to fish, as he was right away gutting and cleaning the fish a bit. I have no idea how to do this but it seems that you make an slice behind the gills and then split open the underside and then remove the guts (feel free to inform me if I am wrong).

The final haul

We decided that we had enough for one night, it was beginning to rain a bit and it was 9pm and we had not had dinner yet.  We arrived in Skulsfjord and the weather was nice, cloudy but no rain here, we anchored the boat and started loading into the dingy.  In about 30seconds the weather changed, lots of rain and wind, waves, We sheltered in the boat for a bit, as we would not really be able to paddle the dingy to shore in the wind and waves.
After a few minutes there was a lull and we went for it and made it to shore without problems.  Was pretty amazing (and a little stressful) to see how fast the weather can change on you.

After getting back, Harvey turned the kitchen into a slaughter house and we put away the fish.  I had the fun task of splitting the heads into smaller pieces so that Yukon (the dog) can have them.  This would not have been to bad, except the hatchet I had was a bit dull, okay actually it was really dull. But with a knife to help out and a bit of force, I managed to cut up the heads, and in the process see parts of a fish I'd never had, and still don't have, any interest in seeing.

On Sunday, the weather was again variable in the morning, windy, rainy, then sunny, then windy and rainy all over again.  However, at about 2pm the weather cleared.  At 5pm we went out fishing again, to a new spot. Again after just 2 to 2.5 hours we caught 15 mackerel.  There must have been a school of them swimming around because only one cast had just one fish, all the others had three or four and I think one cast even had 5 fish on it.

Again, Harvey was kept quite busy cleaning and gutting fish, having time to cast once or twice with a rod before having to work at cleaning full time.  However we came a bit more preparred today so he had a few more buckets to use to help organize and he was much quicker.

Quick Fishing Trip

Yesterday Harvey and Angelika returned from their holidays in Germany.  I met them at the shopping center in town on their way home from the airport.  We had a bit of late dinner.  Harvey and I had beer marinated whale meat...mmmmm, delicious!

Then we decided that since it was such a nice night we would go out for a little fishing trip in their boat.  Since the boat is just a few hundred meters from the house, this is rather quick and easy to do.

We headed out and I stuck the go pro up front to take some pictures, just in case.
We did not catch any fish, but it was very nice to go out on the water.  It was calm and quiet and relaxing (though a surprising number of boats were out and around). We did see some jellyfish.

On the way back, Harvey noticed some ripples that did not seem to just right, so we stopped and turned around and saw a porpoise splashing around.