"When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an adventure is going to happen."

- Winnie the Pooh

On Saturday, one of the locals at work took some of us down to the frozen delta where the Umeå River meets the Gulf of Bothnia to do a spot of ice fishing.

Here we are loaded up on a snowmobile-train to take us down to the river (except me, as I took the photo):




Tis quite a starkly beautiful area, and whoever is the Norse god that controls the weather, he or she was quite cooperative, giving us around -2 degrees (freakin warm), and blue skies with occaisional cloudy periods.





a frozen jetty:



Here Uwe and I drill a hole, Pedro laughs to himself about the plight of the Somalians, or something.



Håkan waits patiently for nothing to happen.



Anders strikes a pose which is difficult to strike without the proper gumboots



Of course, it being winter, all the smart fish had either swum south long ago, or collected enough nuts in the autumn to hibernate through the winter. Whatever the case, we didn't even get a nibble. Not even a sly look. I'm told a good catch is about 15cm long and weighs about 300 grams, so I wasn't actually all that disappointed.

Good thing we brought hamburgers. Bad thing my eggs all broke, leaving the bacon encrusted with eggshells, and also I coudn't find any tinned pineapple in the supermarket (what up wit dat?) , so my grand plan of doing aussie-style Burgers with the Lot didn't come to fruition. I did have beetroot, but beetroot does not an aussie-burger make, a fact which McDonalds have yet to get through their insulated skulls.

Here Håkan prepares the firewood, while Leonid has yet to give up hope for fish.




Good thing about ice is that all fires are self-extinguishing. Just think, dear Grampians readers, how much property could have been saved if the whole area was iced over in preparation for the bushfire season!



After lunch, with our bellies full but our souls disillusioned with the excitement potential of sitting next to a hole doing nothing, we took turns taking the snowmobile for a fang over the frozen river.
One word: 'ken freaken awesome!

The frozen river surface looks perfectly flat, but actually has ever-so-slight undulations, which give you a bouncee-bouncee ride when you're going 80km/h!

Like hitting top-speed aquaplane on the kiosk/digi in calmish waters, but much faster.

Since I was taking pics, there are none of me driving . here's a couple of Pedro and Anders (although Pedro described my driving as the scariest).





Later, Anders' cousin came down in his new snowmobile which can apparently reach 150km/h. He didn't let us drive it.



Battered, windswept and weatherbeaten from the snowmobile shenanigans, we sat back and enjoyed a traditional swedish relaxant: strong black coffee mixed with hembränd, aka moonshine. And when the swedes say hembränd, they mean it!! (Which, if translated, would be like saying moonshine, and meaning that.) It lights a fire in your tummy!

(safety note: Anders, who drove the snowmobile home, abstained. Drunk snowmobiling is one of the most popular forms of death in northern sweden)



As we were kicking back in the ice with our rocket-coffees, there was a tubby little bitch of a kid who was cutting sick on a nearby hill, and taking full advantage of his father's snowmobile driving:








That night, we all went back to Anders' place, and I cooked them my Afghani chiken and spinach adaptation, and the red wine flowed like goon from a sack, and there was much rejoicing and merrymaking.

So that was my day, and it was good one.