salmonjunky
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Its been a real roller coaster ride with the arctic weather conditions around here lately as our jolly Scottish friends along with a few friendly chaps from Ireland, Germany, Sweden and merry old England survived temperatures that went from days with 30 degrees C (if you could find the shade) suddenly down to 4 degrees with howling winds, freezing mist, and fog - then back up again at the end of the week to 25 C without a cloud to be seen in the sky. By late Monday afternoon the Kharlovka river temp had soared to 18 C only to follow up with near freezing air temperature during the middle of the week that rapidly brought the river temps back down to a reasonable 11.8 C to finish off an amazing spell of spring weather. Water levels were relatively high throughout, slowly dropping from 62cm down to a more manageable 34cm as many of the pools on the Litza are just now starting to take shape and become fishable.
Although we started off with our Scottish Sunray shadows and floating lines, the boys had to adapt frequently and be a bit creative throwing out everything from intermediates to 700 grains. While there were daily reports from the estuary guards that good numbers of salmon - several of them very large - were seen splashing about in the estuary, the well oxygenated warm rivers in addition to the bright skies seem to have kept the big salmon down - running straight through the lower beats, only to possibly pause temporary through the middle with nothing really stopping them until they reached the falls.
Thankfully Mikael Frodin was back on camp again with bags of his special tubes (which are now on sale in the lodge) for his annual spring master class. Along with his power point of salmon tricks, Mikael spent much of the week giving lessons and filming his pupils on the river. Like a golf pro examines and fine tunes his swing, these short video clips allowed us to see to our faults and cast like champions!
Thankfully, in addition to their unexplainable arctic sun tans along with a couple of soar throats, the boys managed to pick up some hard earned silver along the way. As usual Big Dave was able to locate a nice salmon or two up to 19 pounds nearly everyday. Johannes seemed to have enough action to keep the smile rolling on his face through the week including a beautiful 22 pounder late in the week from the Litza tent pool.
Jamie certainly lead the way for Scotland landing back to back to back 16, 22, 23 pounders during the storm up at the Kharlovka falls.
While Alex, Graham and Keith all managed to pick up a few nice ones in the mid teens, it had to be the 20+ pounder and Darky's new Salmon Dance that wins the prise!
Film - Clip coming asap (DarkySalmonDance)
Considering all the fun and sun (and cold) we had last week - we were thankful to land 31 salmon on the week.
The good news is the rivers are just now coming into great shape with salmon stacking up from the waterfalls down. We are looking forward to the mild temperatures and cloudy skies and even a bit of rain that is forecasted to return (along with the giant salmon) by early next week.
Justin.
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