Last Thursday (may 22nd) was my last chance for a late season, icefishing trip. Me and a friend was going 50km/31miles into the mountains by snowmobile to stay one night at a cabin, catching and eating char with something to drink.

When me and this guy take any of our trips we already know something is going to break before we go. We had two snowmobiles and one sled. After around 13 miles, I stopped to refill my lip with snuff and talk about how lucky we were. As we sit there he notice the smell of something burning, we open the hood of his snowmobile and discover that the oilfeedline is holed and oil is pouring on the exhaust. Its either burn your fingers fixing it or let it run dry of twostrokeoil, we choose to burn our fingers. Soon we are on our way again, the lake we drove on was flat as a floor and we made very good speed. After a while we entered another, smaller lake. This one had medium sized snowdunes, and I found it extremely funny jumping from one to another. I don't know how fast we went but at least 100kmh/62mph and thats fast on snow.
Suddenly I felt that something went wrong and when I looked back I saw an amazing explosion of snow with the sleds storagebox head first into the snow. In the box was all our gear and food. Imagine clothes, sourcream, two icedrills, plenty beercans and so on rotating wildly high in the air and then 60-0 in 8 inches. We strapped it back on the frame and luckily didn't go hungry, cold or sober more than necessary that night.


My friend checking how much damage was made during the somersault. Unfortunately I didn't find the camera until we arrived at the cabin, so no pics of the trip.


The cabin.

After a drink we went fishing and we stayed on the ice until around 0100. By then we had more fish than we could eat and got quite hungry.


Me with one fish.


My friend with some of the catch. The picture is taken 23:58, the sun was behind a mountain but its close to daylight anyway.


The morning after.

We had a great time!

Now thats what I call a fishing trip!

Thanks for posting - we want to hear more of your adventures up in the Arctic!

Rgds Ian

Nice!! Now they are some nice Char!!

Rgds,
FB

Shit, that just made me homesick!!!

Johan

Great story and wonderful pictures. I'm counting down the days to heading off for trout but the landscape will be somewhat different from yours. In saying that it will be light enough to walk/fish nearly all the time. Do you find that when it is light all the time you tend to fish yourself to exhaustion? It is certainly something I've found myself doing. Here are some snaps of my destination, what a contrast to your ice fishing:

Philip, don't do that to me.

It's not fair, I want to go there, not be working here....

The Hebrides??

Yes caorach, I often find it hard not to try just one more thing when fishing at night. If the fish bite or you have seen or lost a big one its almost impossible to quit. We also have some places more like the ones in your pictures, but then we need to go higher up. This time we only had a day and a night and it wasnt conditions for either skiing or walking. Use of snowmobiles is very restricted.

This weekend I'm going to my inlaws cabin chopping wood, that will give me an alibi to go out trying for some Halibut. I'll bring the camera but dont expect halibut pictures, last year I saw one under the boat once, and that was all.

900 SS: that was exactly the problem I had, as it was near to daylight all the time I just kept on having "one more cast" or walking a little further to the next loch and ended up exhausted after a few days with little or no sleep. It took me a little while to discover my mistake and I'm sure you know that you can get really carried away when on a fishing trip. On a positive note I tend not to have any problems with snowmobiles!

You're spot on the money Brian, the lochs are all on Lewis except for the bottom one which is the very famous Voshimid at Amhuinnsuidhe on North Harris and it is, of course, a salmon loch. The others are all trout lochs. For me the appeal of Lewis is that you can just get out of the car and if you can walk to it you can fish it. They also don't have the same bad habit of putting up fences, walls and hedges that us Irish do and so the walking is made much more pleasant as a result. However, as detailed above, with 1200 lochs to choose from it is possible to fall over with exhaustion.