LAPLAND

LAPLAND

Grayling, Ice Cream, and Sleep Deprivation.

Photographer and writer Jess McGlothlin finds the good life โ€“ and a few mosquitoes โ€“ under the Swedish Lapland summer sun.

โ€œI would drop some bodies for an ice cream.โ€

The accented words pull me from my hazy doze in the back of the Volvo wagon. Lifting my head from its rest on a pile of duffle bags and rod tubes, I squint forward at Ted. Heโ€™s fiddling with the music again, searching for a song on his phone that might help combat the exhaustion weโ€™re all feeling. From the driverโ€™s seat, Hรฅkan eyes an upcoming road sign advertising a petrol station.

Ice cream ahoy. Potentially with no bodies dropped.

Swedish Lapland vista.

Weโ€™re winding through the dense woods of Swedish Lapland, where traffic is more likely to take the form of leisurely trotting reindeer than another vehicle. Over the past few hours weโ€™ve descended from boggy tundra into true taiga โ€“ a swampy, coniferous forest that only seems to intensify the oppressive heat of a Swedish summer heat wave.

Temperatures have been nudging into the mid-90s every day and for Swedes Ted and Hรฅkan, itโ€™s downright oppressive.

Locals Hanna and Viljami Huhtala.

Lapland fly fishing
Main sail of a Swedish grayling.

Hot? Or tired?

A solid angler and bold drone pilot, Ted sports a scruffy look that makes one think heโ€™d be equally at home at a rock concert as he is in a fishing camp. Hรฅkan, a legend in the Nordic fly fishing community, is as delightfully Swedish as they come: cheerful, kind, and with a wicked sense of humour that tends to come out around 2am on the water.ย 

Both are quite keen on coffee and ice cream.

The heat is one factor; our collective lack of sleep might be another reason for the hankering for cold, frosty treats.

Lapland fly fishing
The grayling’s realm.

Lapland fly fishing
Viljami with a lengthy pike.

Weโ€™ve spent the last week fishing at Tjuonajokk, a tundra fishing camp run by the Fish Your Dream team that proved to be home to hands-down the best grayling fishing Iโ€™d ever experienced. Stupidly good. The Kaitum River flows right by camp; itโ€™s the sort of fishery where one can go forth into battle against the mosquitoes to log a few casts, quite likely bringing to hand a grayling topping 50cm before the camp stove coffee even has time to boil.

Read the rest of Lapland in issue 41. It’s free!

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