Thoughts on Cod and Life from the Fjords of Scandanavia
It took me six changes and about a foot’s worth of cut leader before I found the right fly. A ragged clouser, with paint chipped off the dumbbell eyes, green-died whitetail fur, and still clinging to the stench of UV glue. Norwegian fish liked this one, especially when I let it sink to the bottom and drew it back with a two-handed retrieve.
That fly remained cinched to my leader for four days as I sought a Scandinavian grand slam: pollock, mackerel, and cod. Pollock came easy. Well, not easy, but I caught a load of them. They have caramel flanks and eyes too big for their surfboard shaped body. Some fight with the energy of a sunken bike tire and others with the force of a miniature tuna. On day one, my fly implanted itself in the throat of some lethargic pollock, and despite my best efforts for a clean release, its life faded fast. So, I brought it back to our AirBnB, laid it on an undersized marble cutting board, and filleted it with a knife duller than a ruler.
On day two I found an Atlantic mackerel. The week prior I had been teased by a shoal of them that hunted the harbor around Bergen. I watched from a concrete pier as their tiger-striped backs swam in and out of view like dancers under a strobe light. From then on, I obsessed over them, and when I caught one, I imagined, I’d probably catch a whole school. But that didn’t quite happen. I thought it was a pollock at first, but then a torpedo rocketed from the water. An Atlantic Mackrel. I crouched low and hid the fish out of view from the pier across from the water. I had drawn the attention of two old folks who divvied up their time between sun bathing and polar bear plunging, and while they admired my sloppy fly fishing finesse, they probably wouldn’t enjoy watching me dispatch the fish they had waited to see me catch. I texted Morgan and asked her to sneakily bring me down a cooler. It was my only mackrel of the trip.
A cod prowled in the shallows below a bridge leading into Bergen, where the tide ran in strong and starfish clung to the rocks. The fish escaped the current to forage languidly among the bladderworts and blue mussels and the boulders they were all rooted to. I watched it from above like an osprey hovering over the ocean. It had a lateral line like a pollock, but it was fatter, more brutish. Its whiskers drooped low like a channel cat and a downward facing mouth poked in and out of the mussel beds like a plunger. It probed for a while, gave one lazy shake of its tail, and drifted effortlessly back into the current.
I never did catch a cod in Norway, but I dreamt about them, and envied the racks of their dried and salted fillets being sold at the fish market. In a way, I don’t really mind. It reminds me of the days I’ve returned emptied handed from duck hunting or the opportunities I’ve let slip. You leave a bit of your soul in the moments that don’t work out, and the feelings leave me obsessive over the need to reconcile them. The ‘I won’t do that again’s or the ‘I won’t let that opportunity slip’, or the ‘I will catch that fish’. In the end, the compulsion turns out pretty damn good, and it’s led me to do some pretty extraordinary things. When it comes to cod, I’ll happily wait, hooked without closure, until the moment springs again.
