Call me Ishmael

When I traveled to the northern parts of Norway as a flyfisher for the first time in 2003, my main objective was matching the hatch for trout. Everything I had read in my early teens about prominent specimens in what was supposed to be an El Dorado of birch forests, rivers and lakes culminated in a euphoria I had never known before. For a young man with his life ahead of him, it was unlike anything I had heretofore experienced. On the plane to Alta, I was ecstatic. The dream of trophy trout overshadowed everything else. And even if the first trip yielded little results, Finnmark and Troms—the northernmost counties in Norway—became a geographical obsession for me.

Little did I know that lakes in the lowland birch forests would become peripheral. Or that Finnmark, which I thought was mainly an endless expanse of plains, had countless higher mountain plateaus with thousands of both large and small bodies of water. Nor did I have any idea as I sat on that plane in 2003 that my mania would divert from trout to another species. It was impossible to predict that my very existence as an angler would revolve around the idea of catching huge Arctic char, the crown jewel of still water in Norway, a kind of white whale of the mountains…

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