The REAL opener 14 April 2012 in Tirmo

I had set my sights for a pikeride next weekend so I was a bit surprised but also pleased when my brother called me at Wednesday If I would like to go out to see if there`s any ice left on some of his hot spots,well,after a long conversation (two seconds) I promised that it´s okay to go fishing next Saturday(today). I didn´t sleep very well the night between Friday and Saturday preparing myself for the forthcoming session. Woke up 5.00am and made me some coffee and sandwiches and after a quick breakfast I was on my way to a place called Tirmo near Porvoo.I felt very pleased while I was driving along the highway in a nice fishing weather,+3 degrees,a small breeze,maybe 5-6 m/s and rain,I met my brother 6.30am at the shore and after we packed the boat we went out driving in middle of ice floes,the rain had stopped and it was kinda foggy,felt like i was at Titanic :). Very soon we noticed that all the smaller sheltered bays had a ice blanket on so we just had to try to find some other places but we didn´t found any potential good looking places without ice so we were forced to fish on places were we were almost sure there will be no fishes at all but who cares,I had not any skyhigh expectations from the start,it just feels so good to be able to lay some line with a decent sized fly on the other end of it. Here is my first casts for this season chasing pike.

And we were fishing on a place looking like this,nothing wrong with it but it´s not far from a ferry going between Tirmo and Pellinki so the noice disturbed at least me a bit.

I would have prefer to go a little bit deeper into that bay but....the ice again....

Then we drove around for a while until we ended up on a place like this.

We spent the rest of the day here because it was no idea of driving around and around just to see there´s no entry to all really good looking hot spots.Next week it should look totally different,my brother was practicing his casting skills and I tested different rod/line combos and of course I put my winter tied flies in swimming school and made some notices especially about my big daddy #9 rod,first when I used a #9 weight line(21g/323gr)It didn´t felt good in MY hands,but when I combined it with a custom made line (24-26 g)it turned into a very,VERY comfortable combo,very nice and useful to do some tests with your lines/rods,at least for me because if i ever break my favorite rod Vision GT4 I know I have a combo to put in instead. The second thing I noticed was about a one of my flies tied with Body fibre,it turned almost invisible in water,strange :)

We spent six hours at sea and in these conditions it was enough for both of us,even if I didn´t have any sense in my fingers until several hours after arriving back to the shore I feel sooooooo relaxed and I enjoyed every minute of this trip and can hardly wait for the next weekend when I hopefully are able to launch my own boat and hopefully get the monkey of my back :) Here is some more photos to watch.

And finally my "ghosthand".The water temp was between 2.9 and 3.6 degrees,so it will take some time before Pikes will go spawning,think it will happen when water temp is between 6-10 degrees ?