And yes, going for Gold (or at least lots of pike) means hard working. Our regular weapon would be a 9 or 10 weight rod. Try to make as much casts as you can with one of these rods and a heavy streamer and you know what hard working is.
Erik and Harmen-Jan in full action
The tactics for today were easy. Cast your fly almost into the reeds (the closer the better) and then strip in like a madman, just to stay free of the plants underneath. During the entire week none of the four of us had a fish strike very close to the boat. Most strikes were at about 10-15 meter or more. So after stripping in a few meters it was time for a serious rod-bending pick-up and recasting the streamer a meter or two away from the last cast. Unless you had the bad luck of hooking up some dirt. Then you would have to strip the entire thing to the boat and pick the dirt of your hook before you could fish again.
Efficiency, combing out the potential area’s and recognizing the good spots. Although the Finnish still had a good lead, England 1 and both Dutch teams were close enough to each other to have one or two good fish making good differences and still changing rankings. Even two or three good fish more than the Finnish team would give all the other three teams a fair shot at victory. So we had to do it today and the effort had to be 110%.
As said before, this day we were going to try another boat and our Team captain Harmen-Jan showed his value. He was at the boats first and claimed the boat he and Erik had yesterday for Hajee and me. And what a good boat it was… A skiff type boat, with a small motor you could lift up out of the water and the guide proved to be a master of the oars. Almost no reed-bed turned out to be too shallow and he could drift almost every drift we demanded. We started by going through the shortcut passage, the one we could not make with Kari’s boat. Netherlands 1 followed us and we decided to try to start quite close to each other so we could exchange all valuable information.
Hajee in front of the skiff, ready for battle as we cruise to the delta
Netherlands 1 took the reed-beds on the left-side of a bay, we went upwind and started on the right-side. The water in this bay was not the clearest, but yesterday Erik and Harmen-Jan had seen a lot of pike spawning in this area and that means they must be there. Our first three drifts were not so successful, but the guide was a big pleasure. He could really let the boat drift perfectly around the reeds and we felt that we were doing the best thing possible.
We tried to exchange some words with the guide, he did understand our English combined with hand and foot signals a bit. Pike is Hauki in Finnish, so we were educated that morning. So we started to make up silly songs and melodies… “Oh Hauki, where are you?”-Hajee sang and at the moment it came out of his mouth he had a strike. It turned out to be a little hauki, but at least there was a sign of fish. The song worked out a little bit as we had three little hauki’s more aboard the boat. None of them big enough to score for the tournament.
When we finished (no, we are not Finnish, we are Dutch) the area we cruised to Harmen-Jan and Erik. They still had no pike in the boat, but lost 4 bigger ones and that was a drag. Imagine getting 4 sized fish on the score in the first hour…. That would have been a serious attempt to get that gold medal. Harmen-Jan told us it was a madhouse, they started and had them on within that first hour, but unfortunately could not get any of them in the boat. At least one thing was for sure, the tactics were good and all four of us had good faith for the rest of the day.
typical view of the surroundings early in the morning
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