Mika Lappalainen | Friday, 26 June 2020
As normal everything seems to happen at same time. Starting from midsummer which was last weekend Finnish people start their summer holidays. It means that guiding season is really starting, even it will much more quit summer than earlier. Anyway this week I had few trips and some other issues.
We still have summer, hottest day has been so far +30 celsius in shadow. Don’t get it wrong, normally we have +20 and if lucky +25, So this hot wave is not every summer issue. Mosquitos, horseflies, and small biting gnot (?) are here. It means difficult time for some people. With reindeer all of this is helping. It gathers reindeer in big herd and we are marking the calves. In this week it means that in three nights we have been spending time in forest with all the bugs and reindeer. Last night it was about 4 am when I came home. It was great night even it was not about fishing, sun didn’t set etc.
Like I told I had few fishing trips this week also. I made guiding in one of my favourite areas on Kitka river. We fished there also with Paul few years ago. On first trip we met some people on parking lot and they were coming back from river. I asked how was fishing but all of them told me that they couldn’t get there because of mosquitos. I went speechless, to be honest I had to go behind the car to laugh. On the way there is about 100 meter of swamp where mosquitos like to stalk innocent people. After swamp you walk another 100 meter and they are gone. One group was brave enough to go all the way to the river, but they had returned from fireplace. Same reason, too many mosquitos. Really people…. We have been on the moon but can’t use repellent against mosquitos. Come on.
Finally we reach fireplace and got our gears together. Yes there was mosquitos but not bad and even my guests started to laugh about these stalking mosquitos. When we went fishing on river, nobody even noticed mosquitos if there was any at all. Summer’s hit product is Thermacell. Those seems to be even more precious for people than their phones. Thermacell is device where you put repellent pillow and gas refill. Gas will heat pillow and repellent is giving you protection againts mosquitos and bugs.
Fishing was still kind of difficult for whole week. High water, still flood. We got lot of smaller graylings and few around 30 cm but comparing earlier years in this time it should + 10 cm for everything. In the beginning of June water temperature jumped from 8 to 15 and during past week it has been rising up to 19 celsius. So water is much warmer than normally in this time, it is more like July now. Bigger fishes seems to hide on deeper water and their behaviour is like on July.
Forecast is that weather is cooling and I hope it will be like that. It means that waters will cool also little bit but time will show. Guiding and fishing coming up on next week but probably also hay making. So another busy week coming up. It is summer without night.
Have a nice weekend and go fishing.
Mika from Finland
