I was certain there was good reason to bring filleting gear along for the Carpentry Club’s annual trip to the ‘unnamed lakes.’ To prepare, I sharpened my filleting knife until it could glide along the spine of a trout like butter, imagining how the fillets would stack up quickly and efficiently in the cooler at the end of each day. Most previous trips to these lakes had certainly justified such optimism.
We arrived at the area around two o’clock on Thursday and went straight to fishing, as our rented cabin wasn’t ready for check-in. As usual, we split into two groups: the ‘senior citizens’ of the club headed to Vallavatn, while we younger ones went to Arnarvatn. Full of hope, I began casting from the point in Arnarvatn, a spot that has yielded great results for me at least three times before. By the end of the day, however, I felt discouraged to have only three rather small trout to show for the first shift. My partner fared no better, landing only one. The seniors, on the other hand, had a productive day at Vallavatn.
On Friday morning, I went to Vallavatn, expecting plenty of bites given the seniors’ success the day before. By two o’clock, my partner had caught three or four trout, while I had none. The situation remained bleak. The seniors moved to Harðarvatn but didn’t do much better there, catching only a single flounder. In the afternoon, my partner and I tried Harðarvatn while the seniors went back to Vallavatn; they landed a few more trout and even an eel, but we caught nothing. Our final shift was on Saturday morning, a repeat of the previous morning’s routine, except this time we all fished Arnarvatn. It seems that sometimes, you’re just always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The weather was decent during those days—temperatures between 11 and 13 degrees with a cool breeze shifting between the northeast and northwest, occasionally dropping to a dead calm. It clearly hasn’t rained much in the area lately, as we have never seen the water levels this low in all our trips there. Perhaps it was the low water that caused the sluggish fishing, or simply the timing; we have usually visited these lakes a bit earlier in the summer.