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OUR DREAM TRIP to LAPLAND

Sture and Joakim

Our five days adventure started early on the 5th of August. Ordinary flight to Kiruna was with Scandinavian Airlines, SAS. We experienced the new fingerprint check-in procedure at Arlanda airport, good for the security and good for us to know that all our luggage was on-board.	In the past it has happened that parts of our luggage were lost when we flew to and from Kiruna and we had to wait half a day or more for the next aircraft to arrive hopefully with our lost luggage. That risk should now be eliminated. We arrived sucessfully to Kiruna and from there took a taxi to the float plane below.......
	We arrived sucessfully to Kiruna there a taxi took us to the air base beside a lake there the small one motor propeller-driven aircraft ”de Havilland Beaver” (see enclosed photo) after a while landed and took us on-board. That aircraft was manufactured 1951 and works still perfect. We have flied with it a couple of times before and we trust to it very much.
During the 40 minutes flight towards the north we fly over a tundra like landscape totally unhabitated and desolated with streams, lakes, brushes and rocky mountains (see enclosed photo). We landed on a small lake a couple of kilometers from Råstoätno for our 3 days and nights quota-based stream.
	After about a one hour wandering with our heavy packs (25 kg each) we reached at last our goal. It took us another hour to find a horizontal and smooth place to put up our tent (see enclosed photo). Such places are fairly hard to find in these areas. The view to the south and north from our tent, please see enclosed photos!
About 9 o’clock pm at day 1 we were ready to try our fishing luck. We were not at all disappointed as we got many graylings about 1 kg each and some trouts as well about 5 hg each, some more. See enclosed photos. The photo of the trout is nice as the fly has perfectly get stuck to the corner of its mouth.
	We let all fishes go back all days into Råstoätno water. One photo shows how I hold the tail of a grayling before I let it swim away just to make me sure of its ability to recover after our fight some minutes before.
The first evening we had a visit by an Arctic fox. These foxes are rare but I think the fox smelt us at long distance and tied that smell to the chance to find food e.g. fish offals. It moved about us, sometimes very close, but suddenly it ran towards our tent some 100 meters from us. The opening of the tent was not closed as we didn’t expect any visitors. Of that reason we had to take a fast run to the tent to save our food and shoo the fox away. We arrived in time.
	We hadn’t noticed the fox if it had started the visit at the tent. If so, we had probably lost some parts of the food, especially the meat and the sausages. We were lucky this time and we learned to be more protective. Besides the artic fox we didn’t see so much of the artic animal life. Some artic birds e.g. artic skuas flew over us and a reindeer cow with its calf passed us one day. We didn’t see any people either which we appreciated very much.
After some hours sleep we were ready for day 2. As Råstoätno lacks artic chars we decided to take some hours walk to a small lake some kilometers from our tent. We had been informed that some heavy artic chars could be catched there. We had bought fishing permits for surrounding lakes as well. Our wandering efforts were abundantly recompensed as we got plenty of artic chars alternately on fly and spinner. We were allowed to use spinners in the lakes. In Råstoätno only flies are allowed.
	We abandon our rule not to kill the caught fishes and offered 4 arctic chars, 2 for ourselves and 2 brought home to my wife Anita as a small reward for her patience and anxiety about us during our days of wilderness life. Joakim takes care of all cooking. I am only allowed to prepare the coffee. One photo shows Joakim in his cooking activity to prepare one of the chars on our small portable Trangia-kitchen.
Day 3 we dedicated to Råstoätno. We tried a lot of attractive fishing places during that day. We got very much of graylings and trouts. We got very much training to catch and release fishes. The weather was perfect all days, not too windy, sunshine, often open skies and only some short showers of rain. The temperature was over 20 C at noon day 3 and I took the opportunity to fish stripped to the waist (see enclosed photo). At midnight the same day the temperature was below 0 C. The main reason for that dramatic difference was the open sky. All warm air disappear upwards, no clouds were there to stop that. The enclosed photo shows the blue open sky behind us when we warm us properly dressed at the fireside.
	As we thought we had investigated Råstoätno sufficiently we decided during day 4 to explore a small lake unknown for us. We had hoped to find heavy artic chars there. The lake was about 2 hours walk away. When we arrived to the lake we didn’t see any marks of fish on the surface of the lake to start with. We thought that the lake had to be freezed to the bottom during the winter leaving the lake totally empty of fish. That feeling changed after a while when we saw fishes jumping. Our fishing luck continued and we were very lucky to catch several heavy artic chars.
One of the photos shows one of my chars (6 hg) in the landing net caught by a WIPP 10 g spinner on a spinning rod (Berkley Phazer, 7 ft,15 g) and the reel Abu Garcia Cardinal 301.
	The biggest artic char (1,3 kg) was caught by Joakim. See enclosed photos with the char in the landing net and when Joakim carefully release the char.
At 9 o’clock on day 5 (Saturday) the Beaver was scheduled to take us back to the civilization. To be on place in time we went up about half past three to give us enough time to pack up and walk the kilometers to the landing lake. We managed to be there in time and had time to take a rest as well (see enclosed photo with Joakim resting on his back). The Beaver arrived in time and landed perfectly (see enclosed photo).
	The photo of a part of Råstoätno with our plane tent place up towards the right was taken on our flight back to Kiruna.
The last selected photo shows the winding Harrejokk, maybe our next fishing stream. To use that stream it will be a necessity to use a Canadian canoe for transportation as it is more or less impossible to walk in the surrounding terrain. The flight back to Arlanda from Kiruna went well.