Mika Lappalainen | Friday, 19 September 2025
Last Friday I was fishing and teaching my nephews. It was an absolutely great day, despite weather. Well weather was kind of okay too, sun, +20 celsius... but wind....Winds are getting much powerful than normal. Blows were really strong and dropped lots of leafs from trees already.
Normally when first leaf goes on water graylings shut their mouth for few days. On Friday not sure if it was because leafs or my desperate dry or die with wind, as all bigger graylings were missing. We caught some okay graylings and even smaller trout, yet no big graylings.
Nephews used also nymphs, so they got some better fish, and that was the purpose. I didn't fish so much. In the evening wind went down and we went to see our lake. There were some rises and I rowed as boys were fishing.
They had some problems to cast as both are pretty new in sport so I turned fishing into casting practise. Quite soon both of them had better rhytm and timing and some more distance came out. We continued with another thrill as there were no rises.
Boom... just when nobody paid attention younger one got strike. It happened just between casts as we spoke some smaller changes. And there we were in middle of fishing again. He landed nice rainbow trout and we finished day with nice success. Sun went down and darkness started to come.
Monday I saw news in facebook about too small fish. We have minimun size to fish you can take. I know people "stretch" some so it will be take-able, or they just round them up as there is so little supervision, so getting caught is absolutely minimum risk.
On this news fisherman has caught zander, minimum size is 42 cm to take. He has took fish after measurement, as he said it was 42 cm on his measurement. When fishing warden came to ask licenses and measured zander, measurw was 41,2 cm. So fish was 8 millimeters too short. Some might think it doesn't matter as it is less than 1 cm shorter.
In some business it doesn't matter as it is how you use it. If you built house 8 mm is a lot in long run. Anyway guy caught fines and as it went on his income based fine, he got 20 daily fine and with his income... Fine was 1000 e. Then discussions started on Facebook, about how fine is way too much compared for some other thing. And how it was only 8mm too short so you could round up and let the guy go. How warden had small dick and he had to compensate that with power etc.
All those discussions sums up why fishery is not doing well everywhere. People rather defend and find excuses than says okay, we go with rules and obey minimum sizes.
I'm really happy that this 8mm came up, as it shows we do have supervision on waters, and price can be pretty high to pay. Risk is still low, yet if it makes one or two person to think if size should matter... we are on right path.
I always measure minimum size on guests rods and as there is always different factors during measurement, I put at least 1 cm extra so when excitement hits, it will surely be takeable if they want.
Have a nice weekend enjoy your sizeable.
Mika from Finland