Finland Fish By John Fulmer

George Daniel ran into some bad breaks during international competition with Fly Fishing Team USA in Finland. Still, Daniel, who scored low in personal competition, helped the team rank high.

Fast Finnish water and an unfamiliar fish teamed up to give local angler George Daniel a somewhat disappointing finish in the 2007 World Fly Fishing Championship.

As we reported last month, Daniel, 28, of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, traveled as a member of Fly Fishing Team USA to Kemi, Finland, or what’s considered southern Lapland, to compete in the June tournament. Daniel has been called one of the best fly-fishers in the world, but he ran into a bit of bad luck in Finland. At the 2006 competition in Portugal, he placed fifth out of 110 contestants, the second-highest finish for any North American in the world championship series.

This year the team came in sixth out of a field of twenty-two countries, a considerable upgrade over their tenth-place finish in 2006, but Daniel ended up ranked fortieth out of about 120 participants.

I just drew some tough water and that’s the way it goes,” Daniel said, adding that he probably drew a difficult section of the stream, or “beat,” which is the result of a random draw for the competitors. “Since the team knew I had some rough draws, they figured the best I could do for them would be to score a couple of fish.”

While individuals are ranked, it’s still more a team sport, Daniels said, and each team member is assigned to a particular group of peers from other teams.

“So let’s say there’s 100 anglers; there’s going to be five groups of twenty,” Daniel said. “And how the scoring system goes, you have three hours to fish a particular piece of water. And this year it was all grayling, which we’re not used to fishing, and they had to be twenty centimeters to count.”

Twenty centimeters is just shy of eight inches, and graylings are trout-like fish with silvery-purple coloring. They reach a length of about sixteen inches, have large scales and eyes, a small mouth with ineffective teeth, and a colorful dorsal fin that resembles a sail. For every grayling twenty centimeters or bigger, the anglers received 200 points. For every centimeter above twenty, they received an additional fifteen points.

“So it’s a combination of length and numbers,” Daniel said.

However, the participants are also awarded points on how they rank within their group with a goal of scoring as few of these “placement points” as possible.

“So, whoever gets the most points in the group of twenty gets a Number One placing,” Daniel said. “Whoever gets the least amount gets Number Twenty. If you ‘blank,’ meaning if you don’t score a single fish, you still automatically get twenty placing points.”

Team USA’s big problem, Daniel said, was acclimating itself to the water.

“Where we fished, (on the Simo River) it was extremely tough water,” he said. “Half the time during the sessions, at least half of the contestants would blank on a piece of water. I was very fortunate. I only blanked once and, most of the time, I was able to score at least one fish on water that had been blanked before. So instead of getting twenty placing points, I ended up with ten or eleven.”

Another problem, Daniel said, was the river, which he said was huge, from 120 to 200 feet wide, and had a strong current.

“It was rapid, super-fast water, high gradient, large boulders—it was just atrocious,” he said. “Last time they held it in Finland, I think it was 1989, they actually had to resuscitate a couple of guys. One of our sponsors gave us wetsuits, so during the course of the competition, we’re swimming across the water.”

And the grayling is a different type of animal. They “hold” in white water, battling the current, which was an adjustment for the American team more used to landing trout. Grayling are “schoolish,” Daniels said, and they’re not necessarily spread out over the entire section of water. In a 300-meter stretch of water, he said, there were only two or three spots where the grayling were holding.

“For the first couple of days, we had problems,” Daniel said. “Our guides told us we were fishing too much like trout fishers.”

Meaning that Team USA worked off the seams where trout like to hold down and not in the fast water graylings love. Trout try not to fight the current—they avoid it, for example, by hanging behind rocks—but need to be close enough to fast water to access the “food belt” of flies and insects floating downstream, Daniel said.
“It took us a lot of time, using searching techniques,” he said, “but once you find one fish, quite often that’s telling you there’ll be a few more fish in that vicinity.

“And the Europeans, the Polish, the Czechs, they fish for graylings all the time and they are so much quicker than we are,” Daniel said.

Which leads us to perhaps the biggest problem. While competitive fly-fishing is still a curiosity here—and an incongruity, perhaps, since most people consider it a form of relaxation—it’s a hot sport in Europe. And while it’s all catch-and-release, there are detractors. Some think twenty centimeters is too small, as juvenile fish undergo terrific stress when hooked.

But the sport is growing in the United States. Overtaking the Europeans is another matter. We may never be a fly-fishing superpower until we marshal all our resources to beat the French, this year’s winner, in the 2008 competition in New Zealand. It’s reminiscent of the Cold War posturing between the U.S. and the Soviet bloc with the Olympics used as a stage. Our athletes were amateur athletes. There was always suspicion that theirs were not.

“A lot of these (European) guys are actually paid professionals,” Daniel said. “They’re actually paid to do nothing but compete. These guys will do something like fifty to sixty competitions a year, whereas most of the guys on the U.S. team have full-time jobs. We’re usually doing between four and six competitions a year.”

Daniel, who works at the TCO Fly Shop in State College, said he’s waiting for another shot next year. The U.S. hockey team whipped the Soviets in hockey in the 1980 Olympics. Can Daniel help America out-fish the French in New Zealand?