A Week in Sandbakken, Norway. The Highlight of a Successful August

My new personal best 26lb coalfish

August has been a great month for me. Yet more decent barbel fishing on the River Wye and a fantastic holiday in Sandbakken, Northern Norway. I wont go on about the barbel fishing as I have posted here many times before on the subject. This season though continues to be one of my best with both good numbers of fish and some sizeable specimens too. Sandbakken is something new though, so here's a bit about my week spent there. Four of us, George, Roger, Matt and myself had been looking forward to this trip for sometime after booking it through the excellent Sportquest Holidays. Pre-trip information had told us to expect a great camp in fantastic surroundings and some decent fishing with good cod, coalfish and the chance of some nice halibut. That's exactly what we got! Sandbakken did what it said on the tin and we all had a brilliant week. Day one started well with all of us catching coalfish bigger than any we had previously caught before. These fish shaped rockets were eager to take pirks and jigs worked quickly in some deep water found not far from our camp. Day two and more coalfish were joined by cod, a couple of haddock and a few small redfish. The cod were more in to taking large shads while the haddock and redfish took a liking to feathers. Day three saw me land a halibut of 8lb, I caught it using a mackerel flapper after catching the bait on spinning gear fishing from the jetty just outside our cabin. Days four, five and six continued with some wonderful fishing and saw us catch a second halibut, a wolffish, numerous torsk and plenty more cod and coalies. By the end of the week we had taken cod to 37lb and coalfish to 26lb. All of our expectations had been exceeded. It's impossible to fault either Sandbakken fish camp or Sportquest Holidays from this experience. I would recommend anyone interested to go for it and contact Sportquest Holidays via their website www.sportquestholidays.com

Roger with the biggest of the week - a 37lb cod