Some guys from our club had been to Denmark some weeks ago and told us that heavy rainfall had made river fishing almost impossible due to flooding.
With that in mind we decided to head back to a very small stream where we fished with success three years ago.
The stretched we fished boasted two small hydroelectric plants, shallow bypasses lead a minimal flow of water around these plants.
The first look on the river was very promising, a more or less normal flow with very clear water.



The stream

A close inspection resulted in the spotting of fish, plenty of fish.
That clear water made it possible to spot fish but the same was true for the fish in spotting anglers on the riverbank.
It was obvious that the fish where extremely wary, numerous sedges where moving around the meadows and over the stream we saw no rising fish.
On our first visit fish where rising all over the surface so this situation puzzled us.

Dumping a nymph in the stream and catch a fish right away like
I did three years ago did not work this time.
I could not get the fish to take any of my nymphs.
As a last resort I tied on a sedge and dropped the fly carefully to a stationary brown trout.
As soon as the leader landed on the water the fish would flee to be never seen again.
Maybe the river had received a hammering by anglers or the cormorants had scared the fish, who could tell.

Since the fish where so spooky I tried to nail them in those parts of the river where they could not spot me, the rapid flowing sections behind the turbine houses.
First I tried the outflow of one of the bypasses.
Although the bypass was a ditch I suspected that the fast moving water would surely house the odd trout.
On the first cast the nymph was immediately intercepted and I battled a sizable fish for some moments.
The first fish threw the nymph but some more casts near the outflow yielded at least a little brown for me.


Trout nr. 1

In the past the outflow of the first turbine house was a spot that yielded many fish for me.
I entered the channel downstream from the turbine house and waded upstream placing the nymph along the weed lines.


Turbine house 1

Downstream from the turbine house

While wading I only scared fish away so I got out of the stream and crawled right up to the white walls of the turbine house.
The stream was only 3ft. wide at that point so all I could do was to drop the nymph including the indicator down in the channel.
The nymph floated only a foot or so along the channel when a fish dragged the indicator down.
A good brown trout was hiding in the depths and had taken the nymph.


Trout from the turbine house

The other guys had no luck in the mean time.
Only Tom had caught a nice rainbow while the rest had skunked.
After a lunch break in the afternoon some of our party wanted to fish another section of the river downstream.
Since I knew it was total swamp down there I wanted to skip that part but I was overruled and so we spend valuable time in a section of the river that consisted of marsh and quicksand
with very little trout.

After a while we returned to the place we started fishing and I could continue my quest for trout.
A visit at the first turbine house yielded another small brown trout.
The next object I explored was turbine house no. 2, that place looked very fishy.
To get into a position to cast I had to enter the swamp and carefully wade trough a mass of aquatic plants that would not be out of place in the Amazon.


In the swamp.

At least the bottom was mostly gravel so I did not sink in to far in the muck.
The fast flowing water from the turbine provided some cover from the wary trout.
I managed to make a few cast through an opening in the brushes and the nymph floated past the turbine house.
The drift yielded another little brown for me, fish nr. 4 was a fact.



At turbine house nr. 2

Further downstream of turbine house 2 some deadfalls looked like a promising fish hideout.
When I waded out further in the swamp the bottom turned into quicksand so I hastily retreated to higher grounds.
We stayed until sunset in the hope of an evening rise but nothing happed.
My companions had all hooked into trout but one or two fish per angler was just not good enough, even the pretty landscape could not outweigh that fact.

We concluded that we must have been extremely lucky at our visit three years ago.
This stream was definitively scrapped from our “to do” list .
We would surely find some replacement stream since southern Jutland had plenty of rivers to choose from.