Fishing Scandinavia from Float Tubes .....

Tubing Arctic Sweden

 Reproduced here with kind permission from the author:

Chris McCully   www.chrismccully.co.uk    Photos: C McCully, J Sadler

We met at Arlanda in August 2007.  James and Martin arrived from Amsterdam together with what seemed like several hundredweight of angling luggage.  I travelled to the airport by taxi from the centre of Stockholm, toting a single bag weighing (I hoped) 21kg.  Over several cups of coffee we thought aloud about our destination, Lainio in the Swedish Arctic, and the fishing it would provide: pike in stillwaters large and small; grayling in the river; trout and charr in some of the local lakes; perch everywhere.

            The first problem on these kinds of trip is angling luggage.  Many airlines have a checked baggage limit of 20kg, and that can be a problem if you’re taking a normal float-tube, waders, fins, boots, a couple of fly-rods and all that goes with them.  On this trip we’d brought ultra-lightweight tubes – Outcast Trinity, about which I’ll say more later – and had tried to keep weight to a minimum.  Nevertheless, despite wearing my wading boots to the airport and keeping camera equipment as hand-baggage I still weighed in at a stubborn 21kg, and I didn’t want to think about what James and Martin’s gear might have weighed. (They’d taken plugging and spinning rods with them as well as the fly-rods.)

            As it turned out I needn’t have worried, and in retrospect James and Martin’s kitchen-sink approach was more sensible than my own can-I-do-without-it fetish: AirNordic have a hunter-sized baggage allowance of 30kg – the sort of allowance that laughs at transporting haunches of reindeer and bits of sledges - so by the time I boarded the plane I was wishing I’d brought a full intermediate line as well as a sink-tip shooting-head, and was regretting leaving the life-vest at home.

            We landed at Kiruna, picked up a hired Volvo, and headed for the local shopping precinct.  The Kiruna supermarket is awesome: alongside bread, coffee, salt, chocolate, sausages and the inevitable pickled herrings it sells rubber boots, gardening equipment, compasses, skis, haunches of reindeer, bits of sledges, second-hand snowmobiles, fishing tackle, sweetcorn and brandlings.  We bought what seemed to be all of them, piled back into the car, and headed north again, to Lainio, the fishing camp and journey’s end. 

            The second problem on extended float-tubing trips is the tube itself.  A defective tube – one with, say, a slow leak whose origins remain mysterious however much you prod about with sealant – is an awful and a worrying thing.  A small boat begins to seem dreadfully cramped after a day or two; a large boat seems too heavy, too slow; a fragile boat seems vulnerable to the sharp ridges of wind-whetted Arctic rocks; a tube built like Belgium seems cloddish, reluctant, insensitive to the fins…. And always there’s the business of inflating and deflating the craft, so the valves must be tough and trouble-free.

            Prior to our 2007 Arctic trip I owned two float-tubes – a small round boat which is the proud possessor of an untraceable ultra-slow leak, but which weighs a mere nothing, and a Super Fat Cat in which I feel suspiciously like Aristotle Onassis.  The last is a grand boat, and has stood up to the rigours of week-long Irish float-tube trips without once needing re-inflating, but it weighs in (wet) at something like 18lbs., has four air chambers, and is relatively slow to inflate and deflate with a standard foot-pump.  For Lainio and the pike of the Swedish Arctic, therefore, I decided that a compromise tube, the Outcast Trinity, might offer lightness and practicality as well as all the other well-known advantages of V-shaped tubes.  Since James and Martin had also equipped themselves with the same tubes we had a very close encounter with Outcast Trinities that week.  Here’s the review I wrote of this craft after our return from the wilderness (www.chrismccully.co.uk):

  On this month's trip to Arctic Sweden we took three Outcast Trinity tubes. The Trinity is a very lightweight, no-frills craft. It weighs a mere 8lbs - or in practice, 10-12lbs including the pump and a pair of fins, and the tube comes in its own handy backpack. This last has the advantage that European airlines - at least, those airlines that took us North - will accept it as hand-baggage.

The Trinity has only two pockets accessible from the fishing position, and these are sited fairly low on either side of the tube (ie. they could get wet), so there's only limited space for gear, though you could use the space behind the seat. There are no D-rings to which you can attach stuff like unhooking forceps, either. There's an inflatable stripping apron, which strikes me as a bit fussy; you could dispense with that. The fishing position is high - lovely for fly-fishing - and the tube, consisting of four air-chambers, is quick and easy to inflate and deflate. It has fairly good valves. The material is a sort of denier nylon throughout, and there's no reinforced bottom, cf. the Super Fat Cat. Since it does have those four air-chambers it's in principle a pretty safe craft, since you have three over if one goes 'pop'.

The real drawback of the Trinity is that it takes a trip or two to fiddle about and get the trim right. Set the central (sitting) section too far back, and the bow of the tube sits very low in the water; set it too far forwards, and it seems as if you're going to slide from your seat into the lake. Once you've learned where to site that central section of the tube, though, the ride is dry and fairly comfortable.

Another minor disadvantage is that I found the tube just a touch small. That said, I'm 6-foot plus. Maybe the tube, which is made is China, was trialled on Oriental sizes.

For back-packing and other lightweight, mobile trips, and for smallish stillwaters, this is a good boat, and one from which you'd get a reliable two or three seasons use. For heavier work, or for more exposed stillwaters, I'd prefer the stability and security of eg. the Super Fat Cat - and no, that's not because I like the fact that it has drinks holders at either end of the arm-rests.

We imported our Outcast Trinities from the Float Tube Store in the US (www.thefloattubestore.com). The snag came when we opened the tubes and tried to connect the pumps to the valves - the supplied rubber connector didn't fit, so I resorted to pillaging a nozzle from a spare pump. Therefore, whatever tube you may buy, for heaven's sake assemble it and try it out before you start humming 'Kumbayama, Lord', packing the firelighters, donning the jolly camping shorts, and taking the tube into the Wastes of Nowhere.

             The third problem about fishing for pike in Arctic Sweden is simply finding the fish.  Although pike are abundant, and are distributed in the slower-moving sections of many rivers as well as in lakes, not every lake holds a head of pike worth angling for.  Bear in mind also that up in the Arctic, pike don’t usually grow particularly big: the springs and summers are short, providing only a relatively curtailed period for voracious hunting and feeding.  Yes, there are occasional giants, but the weight of pike typically spans 4- 10lbs.  Fish of 80-90cm are fairly common, but so far, in two separate visits, I’ve never succeeded yet in catching a metre-plus specimen.  Against that, where they do occur the pike can be very numerous, hard-taking, and strikingly marked.  There’s also the fact that if you do choose to explore some of the off-road lakes then it’s almost a certainty that any resident pike will rarely if ever have seen an angler’s lure before – and they are certainly most unlikely to have seen a streamer fished on the fly-rod.

            Martin and James tended to fish plugs, poppers and jerkbaits from their boats, while I stuck with the streamer.  Of the jerkbaits, a medium-sized Salmo Slider seemed most effective, as did a rat pattern (the like of which I’d only seen on reports of trips to fish for taimen in Mongolia) and the Rebel Buzz’n Frog, with which James was deadly, working this most noisy of lures into weedbeds and along the edges of weedlines.  On the fly-rod, far and away the most effective pattern seemed to be a small (2/0) red-head pattern tied with rabbit-strip, though I also caught pike on a popper nicked from James’s box and smaller sizes of Flash Fly in gold and silver.

            There were several highlights of the trip.  One was moving pike to poppers fished from the tubes.  For all the hours I’ve spent doing it, fishing poppers for summer pike never fails to amaze me.  There the lure is, fussing and gurgling its way back to you like some miniature haphazard duckling.  Then there’s a hunting wake, the swirl of a take….and as ever, you tighten too soon, and miss.  Or the lure simply vanishes into a lethally, quietly-moving set of pike jaws…. It’s true that I move far more pike than I actually hook using this method, but for sheer excitement I know of little to beat it, and I carry the memory of those moving pike well into the following winter.

            A second highlight was tubing a lake which I know for a certainty hadn’t been fished for pike before.  When they heard of our plans to fish it, Henrik and his colleagues at the camp were puzzled.  ‘Well,’ Henrik said over the camp fire one night, ‘maybe there are no pike in it.  All we ever do with that lake is net it for whitefish, just before winter sets in.’  ‘But if there are whitefish…..?’ Henrik let the question dangle, and shrugged. 

            The following morning we set off on what was no more than a hunch.  The conditions were awful – bright sun, almost flat calm.  For an hour or two, nothing happened bar a solitary jack taking one of Martin’s Sliders.  Then I paddled over to an area of lake where the bottom looked more broken: old larch branches – so old and broken that they were covered in filaments of weed - lay in six feet of water, and there was more cover nearby.  Suddenly, shockingly, there was a big bow-wave heading in the direction of the red-head streamer.  For once I kept stripping, waited….and Yes! That fish proved to be a handsome 80cm.  From the same area of water – no more than the size of a tennis-court – I extracted two more pike, the biggest a 92cm fish which put a hoop into the 8-weight.  Then James and Martin paddled over, managing to catch two or three more ultra-hard-scrapping pike on Sliders before the hunting spell ceased.  The pike must have been lying very close together in that one area of the lake, since we paddled about fishing other likely-looking spots – weed-lines, narrows - and moved nothing.

            On future trips I think it would be very worthwhile taking a fish-finder of some kind – not, of course, to locate pike, but to locate contours, weedbeds, and prey.  My standard fish-finder (a primitive but effective and rechargeable Eagle) is simply too bulky and heavy to take on adventures of this kind, but recently I was given a miniature Humminbird which consists of a watch-sized, wrist-mounted dial attached to a small transducer.  This in principle promises well, though I haven’t yet used it.  If it does send any sort of signal, however crude, from the bottom of the lake then it will be worth its weight in platinum on Arctic belly-boating forays.

            In conclusion?  We spent most of our days tubing for pike, paused for supper, and then fished until dark for grayling in the river or trout and charr in lakes close to the camp.  It was a hugely peaceful, rewarding trip, though I can think of many areas of Sweden where the pike would be even more prolific.  In particular, though, the tubes allowed us to be independent, and to fish several lakes which had rarely if ever had any pike-angling pressure. 

            The best fish of the trip?  It was just 94cm.  We were up at a remote lake called Temminkijarvi.  High, burning sun; light wind.  I didn’t expect to do much, and in truth enjoyed a lean few hours in the tube while Martin and James took the old army boat and eventually found a group of pike mugging roach through the weed-beds.  Just after lunch, though, I moved a pike.  I could follow its every fin-movement in the ultra-clear water.  It appeared to saunter after the red-head, accelerated, paused, swam after the streamer again….. As I ran out of arm, the pike just hung there, four feet from my flippers, for many seconds before lazily turning and swimming back to the weed-bed whence it came.  ‘Well, that’s that,’ I thought, hurling the streamer somewhat despairingly in the direction of the vanished pike.  But that was not that; that was….This!  A brain-mangling take, and the fish pulling the tube round, and then round again, before coming to hand.  At such moments – calm weather, clear water – I love being out there in the tube, since you’re so close to the action.  In no other form of fishing known to me can you be so much the participant in all you see and feel around you – dimpling of roach, hatches of fly, weed-stem wafting on some underwater subtlety of lake current…. And there, lying in wait at the edges of your perception, are those magnificent, millennial creatures, Arctic pike.

 Factfile

 For information and bookings, www.lainio.com.  The camp lies on the Lainio river, which offers fishing for salmon, trout and grayling.  There are trout, grayling and charr in some of the local lakes, while several of the larger lakes in the vicinity hold a prolific head of pike whose staple diet is roach, perch and/or whitefish.  The Lainio camp can also help you with car-hire.

 We travelled to Kiruna from Stockholm with FlyNordic (www.flynordic.com).  The drive from the airport to the camp is around 1.5 hours.

 Some form of protection against midges is essential.

Ad Swier’s Passion for Pike, edited by Chris McCully, published in 2007 by Westerlaan Publishers.  Copies may be obtained from Coch-y-Bonddu Books, or direct from www.westerlaan-publisher.com/pike.html

The author Chris McCully's website is at:  www.chrismccully.co.uk

Copywrite for this article is Chris McCully's reproduction only with permission of the author.