Didn't I say "Look out for the trip report" when I went NOMAIL? And still, little did I expect the kind of report I was going to give you...

I went to river Aurland, the queen of Norwegian sea trout rivers on July 15, for a weeks fishing on the Tokvam estate. It was cold in the water, between 7 and 8 degrees, but the height was perfect. We slept during the day and fished the night, with an interruption for a _large_ dinner and some decent wine. Some fish had been caught on worm further down in the valley, and my friend Dag lost a fish on the first night. That was all we felt until Thuesday evening when started to fish at 23.30 on the pool "Benken" (The bench).

Kneeling on the bank, in my third cast, I hooked a fish just six meters from land. It was heavy, and I thought it was one of those wonderful early trouts of 5 or 6 kilogram, for which this river is so famous. It took about 15 minutes to bring it to the bank in the darkness, and I went down and showed the fish up on the gravel. Then I saw the size of it... It was a monster. To make a long story short, it was a sea trout of 11.1 kg, 95 cm long. One of the biggest ever caught on the fly in Aurland. Perhaps the biggest. It was, and still is, absolutely unreal. To make it even more wonderful, I was using an old cane-rod; a Hardy Houghton 10' for line # 7, bought especially for the fishing in Aurland. The chap I bought it from, Glen Percival, had the previous modern record from Aurland, 10.0 kg! The fly was an "Uke-30", composed for that very beat by my friends Janne Stenquist and Thomas Lindquist from Gothenburg.

My girlfriend was with us, not fishing but hiking and sight-seeing, and this was her first trip ever to Norway. Quite a stunning start for her. By the way, we went to the village of Skjolden to se the cottage were Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote some of his best known texts. It had been pulled down in the sixties, as the locals did not see any value in it. In a way, it is better with a ruin than a coffee-shop with Wittgenstein's slippers in a monter, but still. I brought a back two old nails and a stone from the ruin, as a souvenir.

The week after that, I went to river Orkla for some salmon fishing. I took a very beautiful salmon of 6 kg the first night and lost another one and that was it. All in all, we took 15 salmons on 6 rods so the fishing was good. It was a very nice week and I was living high on the marvellous trout. A Scottish friend came over to fish with us, and he did also manage to kill some salmon. Perhaps some of you know him; Viv McLennan, former owner of Rosehall hotel in Grantown-on-Spey where so many fishermen have been staying. He is a real character indeed and told a story that I must share with you:
He has a friend who is a retired navy commander, and who is head ghillie on the Ballindalloch estate on the Spey. Viv sometimes works as a ghillie there, and when he sold his hotel he bought himself a Rolls Royce. The lady who owns the estate once saw the car by the lodge and went to her head ghillie and asked, "Commander, who is the owner of that Rolls?" "It is your new ghillie, milady". Times are changing! Martin