River Em Opening – Two Great Days Fishing!
On Sunday I drove to Em, it was time for the annual meeting with the board of GUS (Gustaf Ulfsparre’s foundation). We had a good meeting in the Em Museum where a lot of important was said and decided for the future work of saving the unique Em sea trout.
Håkan Norling and I fished on the Em together first time 1984. Håkan joined in that evening and we had a quite night with drinks. Early awake at opening day and off to start the Em season. I think most of us expected a rather slow start, but boy we were wrong! There were more fish than expected and 73 m3/s and 5 + degrees made fishing quite easy. The limit on Em is six fish/day, of course including fish that is released. It was easy to get the limited catch. I fished a few of my favorite pools and had some really nice takes on a fast swinging fly in the tail of Home Pool. I fished mostly TTT style of flies with full bodies and both Pahtakorva and Nasty Banana versions proved to be effective. Håkan and I joined in on the upper stretches in the afternoon where we ended our day with a few good takes. All in all a much better opening than we thought. Still a lack of the biggest trout, but a few around 10-12 lbs was OK. Most of the 12 experienced anglers filled their quota.
Second day is always a bit harder. I had some good hours in Home Pool but also in the tail of Pike Pool. Two fresh fat silvery fish and a couple of old ones. Good fun in the spring sun. It’s great to have started the season, hopefully a much better one than last years crazy heat wave summer. I left early Tuesday to catch a plane to Iceland. We will be filming for a short clip to be shown with the Patagonia film Artifishal on the premier in Reykjavik on the 10th of April.
