Last Sunday was a beautiful day – sunny and no wind at all. We decided to rent a boat from Maribell in Kvaløyvågen, about 45 minutes from Tromsø. It’s too cold to use our own inflatable boat, so we allowed ourselves the luxury of a bigger and more comfortable boat. We took the boat almost all the way back to Tromsø, to where Kvalsundet meets Grøtsundet. Almost immediately, Paul caught his very first steinbit!

He caught two more within half an hour 😀 Here is a video of him catching the biggest of the three, this one weighed over 6 kg! A steinbit or wolf fish/seawolf in English is quite a scary fish with lots of TEETH. Steinbit means “stone bite” and when we gutted the fish, we could feel several “rocks” in his stomach. They don’t actually eat other fish, they keep a diet of crabs, cockles, sea urchins… crazy!!! This makes the meat very firm and very tasty 🙂

(For best viewing, choose HD and watch fullscreen!)

My rod is not suitable to catch really big fish, so I mainly got small cod and haddock. The water was so clear that you could see what was on your line when it was still quite deep. I got a surprise when I looked at my line, and saw a cod on it – with a big halibut following it!! Paul is really keen to catch a halibut, but I knew my line wouldn’t be able to hold it. So while I was trying to keep the cod away from the halibut, Paul was trying to catch it with his own rod 😀 Unfortunately the halibut was too clever and swam away. Amazing!

Joking around, here is a fisheye photo of a fisheye 😉 I drove the boat back, which was lots of fun 🙂 It did over 40 km/hr, but that did make it feel very cold!

It quickly got cold after the sun disappeared behind the mountains. We kept catching (too) small cod, so we decided to head back. The owners of the boat rental place were really friendly and came to chat with us when we came back. They let us use their cleaning room so we actually filleted all the fish before going home.

After filleting, we had over 5 kg of cod, haddock, brosme (cusk) and of course the steinbit which made up almost 4 kg of the total. We drove home after 22:00, with the northern lights dancing around while it was still not dark. We dropped almost 2 kg off at Eelke and Roy’s, as it would take us quite a long time to eat that much fish 😀 We came home completely exhausted, I was really glad I had a day off on Monday to recover from the busy weekend 🙂