Spring seems to have arrived in Tromsø and it is warm enough to sit outside as long as the sun is shining and there is not too much wind. Keen to make the most of the weather we ate our first outside meal of the year at Telegraphbukta: hot dogs and a baguette. It still isn't very warm (+4 degrees C) so we cooked the hot dogs at home and brought them in a Thermos flask. This was the first time I tried bringing hot-dogs in a Thermos but it worked really well and made a great early-season BBQ substitute. We brought another Thermos full of tea for afterwards…
The surface of the fjord was like glass and I thought it would be nice to do some fishing, so we nipped home to get the boat. I wanted to fish behind the island of Håkøya, partly because I knew people often catch fish from the bridge there and partly because I thought it would be sheltered from any cold wind.
The place we stopped turned out to be great. From the GPS I can see we only stopped the boat for about twenty minutes and during that time we caught four cod. We used an un-baited 200g pilk on a hand line, which we lowered all the way to the bottom. I felt a fish nibbling it within seconds and wound in a small cod. As soon as that fish was unhooked we send the pilk down again and caught a bigger cod and then another two small ones. I think we spent more time winding the line than waiting for bites. After the fourth cod we stopped, I'm very slow at filleting fish and I didn't want to stay up all night.
We were back on the beach at Telegraphbukta only and hour after we left. This was a good thing because the sun had already gone behind the mountains on Kvaløya and it was getting cold. On the way back I noticed that the tide was very low and wondered if that had helped our catch. The last photo shows the biggest cod we caught. I thought all the fish we caught looked especially healthy and they were very lively on the line, but the proof is in the eating I suppose.