By Peter Nyhuus Jacobsen

The fish we do not catch.

My Fishing buddy has caught 3 fish the last couples of days which make the trip a bit easier. My car can almost find its way on its own due to all the trips to the middle of Jutland.

I choose to end the night with fishing up streams Resen. It is a great night almost cloudless and all quiet. I receive a mms from my fishing buddy. It can only mean one thing: Fish! Quite right, he has seen another fish further up the river. The message gives renewed faith in the project and not before long a fine fish follows the fly.  It avoids the fly three times. Urrgh. I try with different flies, but it was without any success. It is midnight and it is time for coffee and stories together with my friend in the cottage.

An hour past midnight, I leave the cottage heading towards the river. A couple of cars are already to be found at the parking ground, so I choose to drive further up the stream. It was very dark, and it has been a long time since I have been in this area of the river and I tumbled in dark. When arriving at night, I usually spend some time getting oriented by looking for other anglers but no one was to be seen.

As the time reaches 3 am, I can feel my body getting tired. The two hours’ drive back home hits my thoughts. It starts to rain, I put my hood on, and start thinking that was it for tonight. But before I had thought this through, I heard a tremendous splash about 50 meters down the stream. As usual, this gives me a boost and I rise purposively and begin to throw.

It starts to brighten at northeast, and I have a reasonable sight of where and how the fly lands. 10 Throws later, I sense a wedge by the fly in the water. A split-second later in the surface in the middle of the river, a fish chips the fly. I do not have the time to let go of the line, but it is my experience that when a fish crabs this way, it often hooks itself.

The next ten or twelve minutes the fights continues. I sense it is a god fish. No jumps, it swims deep and heavy. It is time to try to land the fish. I make a hole in the rush with one leg and push the fish close to the bank. It stands almost vertically, and I try to reach down to grab the tail. But no! The fish returns into the stream and stands in the surface just a couple of meters from me. I turn on my headlamp and now see a blank broad side of an estimated 80 centimeters’ male fish. “Damn it is beautiful”. But now I see that the hook isn’t in the axis, but right between the axis and the snout. But only with a single point of the treble hook was in the upper part of the mouth.

The sea trout was getting tired and I push it even further into the rush. Here it almost stood vertically again, and I considered catching the fish by the gills, but I’m afraid to harm it unnecessarily if it escapes. I grab it by its tail but I can’t hold on to it, and it swims out into the stream with renewed strength. The Sea trout twist its head lazily from side to side, and I sense that the end is near. Two seconds later the hook slips its grab and the fish glides silently back into the stream and disappears.

A terrible feeling of powerlessness and desperation hits me, and I lie down in the rush, and look up on the most amazing morning sky. This time the fish won and that is probably the way it should be. I can only hope that the fish didn’t get harmed, and will recover enough to manage the rest of the trip towards the spawning ground.

The beautiful morning light in the river valley.

On my way home, the aggravating was replaced by a smirk. Despite everything I got the take, the drill and I saw the fish. And I had also been confirmed that line, leader and the fly work just fine. And that is important.

Would the net I had forgotten made any difference? Perhaps, but I will never know. It is always the big ones you lose . . . Perhaps, it was only 79.5 centimeters 😉

“Tight lines” by the river.

Peter Nyhuus Jacobsen