Two days ago, I went fishing on a real fishing boat! Our next door neighbor Ove and his friend Kjell took me and another foreign resident, Pawel, to get out for a few hours on Kjell’s boat.
We left the docks just before sunrise, 11 am. The sun actually came up, a much welcomed turn of event since it had been stormy and rainy for most of the past two weeks. It was a few degrees above freezing, not warm but not bitterly cold either. Equipped with a diesel engine, a fish finder, and two people who grew up fishing in these waters, I was ready for the bigger ones.
We went to a spot about 30 minutes away north west of the island. The fish finder shows a big gobbled mess of stuff. We dropped the hooks and started jigging. Nothing. We went to another spot, and another. Nothing. There’re boat-loads of fish just under us, but they just weren’t biting. No matter how good your equipment is, or how well you know the waters or how good your technique is, if the fish don’t bite, you don’t get them. We all started to feel that it could have been a lost day.
Spot number 5 proved to be a winner. We were pretty much catching as many medium sized pollock as we wanted. Pawel’s line, which had about 6 hooks, often came up with a pollock on every hook. And he got a couple of big cod. As for me, I simply got the wrong side of the boat. I got a decent sized pollock, but nothing to brag about. Then the eagles came.
Ove threw out a bunch of the smaller pollock to feed the eagles. If the eagles wanted them, they got them. The seagulls knew who was boss. They came so close to the boat — these gigantic, fierce birds — that they could easily snatch the fish right out of our hands. It was tough shooting fast moving objects from a boat in low light, but a few did come out alright.
On a different note, we can close the books on another month. I just uploaded photos from November.
