From Salmon Fishing with Spears to Fly Fishing and Bag Limit

Our ancestors were fishing salmon with fish spears and hunting bears with muskets. Today we are fly fishing and release the fish

Immigrants from Finland settled in the south of Trysil and almanac from 1648...

My vision is that we through the initiative, Gjerfloen Flyfishing, with fly fishing zone, bag limit and maximum size, again shall see the heavy splashes of rising fish in the Trysil river nearly like what our ancestors did in the good old days.

My name is Snorre Grønnæss, born in 1945. I have as you probably understand spent a lot of time with various sorts of fishing. My deep interest for the nature most certainly lies in my genes.

Quite back to the time when my ancestors from Finland settled in this district in the middle of the 17th century, and nearly up to our days, the forest, wild life and fish have been an important contribution to settlement and survival.

Photo: Barry Clarck

I am myself 8th generation on the family farm that was built in the middle of the 18th century. Different things we have stored on the farm from former days, witness that times have not always been like to day. Of curiosities can be mentioned an almanac from 1648. It goes forwards to the year 2000 and at the end we can read the following hand written text: "If the world still exists"

You can even to day imagine the smell of bear from the muskets that were used in the 19th century. The size of the fish spears tell us that the fish at the time must have been several kilos. Surely the main target was the relict salmon from Väneren on its way up the spawning places in the Trysil river.

The camera that my grandfather's grandfather first made use of, shows that the industrial development has been revolutionary. He took up photography in the 1860's and thanks to him we have a rich source of cultural documentation from the last part of the 19th century.

We have for a long time said that there were more and bigger fish in our waters in the good old days. That is probably right even if we unconsciously have a tendency to glorify the past. Equipment and technique are continuously improved. Fishing pressure has increased for a long time and I have during my 60 years long fishing carrier, seen that not only the number of the fish decreased, but the big fishes became more rare in the catches. This development has changed in this area since the year 2000 when we established the fly zone with special fishing rules. Please, see statistics on the News page.

Today we can hardly imagine which quantities of fish there might have been in our river in earlier days. Even if we also today think we have good fishing in Trysil river, there is no doubt about what we see today only is a shadow of what it was once. This observation underlines the fact that the river has an enormous potential of production.