Welcome to the land of a thousand lakes
There are few locations left that have something truly unique to offer, but when we heard whispers of a place in central Finland that promised explosive topwater streamer fishing for large predatory brown trout, we knew we had to find out more. Around that time, renowned filmmaker Todd Moen of Catch Magazine released a sensational short film documenting this unique predatory behaviour, and suddenly the world knew the name of this remarkable place… Kellankoski.
Fast forward a few months, and I found myself on a flight to Helsinki, my mind racing in anticipation of the adventure that lay ahead. I was to accompany a group of 11 anglers for a prime week in June, right at the height of the baitfish migration, and I could barely contain my excitement.
After touching down and settling into my airport hotel, I met up with the rest of the team in downtown Helsinki that evening for a traditional Finnish meal at Ravintola Savotta. The fare consisted of moose, reindeer, bear, and other local cuisine, and it was absolutely delicious.
The following morning, after a restless night troubled by dreams of rising trout, I made my way back to the airport for our connecting flight to Jyväskylä, Central Finland’s regional capital. After an uneventful 45-minute flight, we landed and were met by a driver in a very smart electric minibus who would be transferring most of the group onwards to the lodge.
Moments later, I spotted a familiar face behind the wheel of an approaching vehicle, grinning widely and waving us over. Jani Himanko, whom I’d met earlier in the year at the Fly Fishing Show in New Jersey, is the owner of Kellankoski Lodge and was there to collect the rest of us.
We bundled in and began the final leg of the journey to the lodge, a scenic 50-minute jaunt through the Finnish countryside. As Jani regaled us with the latest fishing conditions and what to expect during the week, a blur of roadside lupins in pastel shades, dense forests, and countless lakes rushed past the windows.
The Night Shift
Situated in Finland’s beautiful Lakeland region, the lodge occupies a small peninsula on the shores of Lake Liesvesi, at a nexus of interconnected lakes. Connecting these lakes are short, powerful rivers that are more like rapids — koski in Finnish — and the lodge is perfectly placed for exploring these. During the summer months, vast shoals of baitfish — roach, perch, and bleak — migrate through these rapids, where they are intercepted by lurking hordes of ravenous brown trout there to feast on this seasonal bounty.
The lodge itself is a former schoolhouse, built in 1923 and painted in traditional Scandinavian red with white trim. It is a simple yet comfortable base of operations, with four double-occupancy rooms, one single room, and a family room with four beds, all arranged around a central dining hall. There are also two cottages overlooking the lake, as well as that most Finnish of amenities: the sauna.
After finding our rooms, we gathered in the dining hall for an induction meeting with Jani, who ran us through the plan for the coming week.
The lodge operates a seven-day programme, with guests arriving on Sunday afternoon or evening (evening being preferable), fishing Monday through Saturday, and departing the following Sunday morning.
Since we were there in midsummer, with impossibly long days and barely any darkness to speak of, we would be focusing our fishing efforts on the latter part of the day. We would head out at around 7pm and fish until 3am, often returning to the lodge and getting to bed by 4am or later if the whiskies were flowing.
This late routine raised a few eyebrows at first, but it would soon become very clear why they did things this way.
During the main fishing sessions, we would fish in pairs with a shared guide, with the guides and beats rotating each day. After a late breakfast at 10am, guests are encouraged to relax, explore their surroundings, or catch up on sleep. For those wanting to fish earlier in the day, there is the option to target pike in the lake or fish the slower sections of the rivers for grayling. However, this is not the primary focus of the lodge, and these sessions would not be fully guided.
Jani went to great pains to emphasise the importance of avoiding the main rapids during the day, saving them for the evening sessions.
Earlier and later in the season, when things settle into a more natural day-and-night cycle, the fishing programme shifts to a more traditional morning and evening session, punctuated by lunch at the lodge.
For us, though, it was time to embrace the night shift.
We all settled into our rooms to relax for the rest of the afternoon, and that evening Jani prepared a traditional, hearty trout soup. After a relaxing evening, we retired for a restful night’s sleep.
The following day, I joined Chuck and Nick for some boat-based pike fishing on the lake. The action was understandably slow under the bluebird skies and high sun, but we had a few hits and I managed to get a small jack pike to the net.
We headed back to the lodge for an early dinner at 5pm. The lodge’s in-house chef had prepared a delicious spread, which was enjoyed by all, and after triple-checking our tackle, we headed out for our first night session.
I was about to get my first proper look at Siikakoski — “whitefish rapids” — a legendary location in Finnish fly-fishing lore and once a favourite retreat of former President Urho Kekkonen.
The anticipation was palpable.
The Show Begins
After a short drive, we arrived at Siikakoski and surveyed the water.
What lay before us was a playground of varied water, with turbulent rapids in the central channel, slower pockets along the edges, and a vast tail-out upstream, all punctuated by the road bridge spanning the bottom quarter.
The beat was approximately 90–100 metres wide and no more than 250 metres long, but we were in no doubt that there was more than enough water to explore.
Even though it was nearly 8pm, the sun was still blazing in the sky, so our guide, Pete, suggested we stick to the calmer water along the edges initially and fish dries to the trout and grayling that were taking advantage of the numerous caddis flies hatching.
Not one to ignore my guide’s advice, I stashed the 7-weight and switched to my trusty 5-weight.
I worked my way methodically upstream and soon landed my first grayling of the trip, a beautiful 52cm fish and my new personal best. It was a very enjoyable little session, with a few small and medium sized brown trout also succumbing to a well-placed caddis.
At around 10pm, with the sun finally flirting with the horizon, Pete suggested it was time to get the streamer rod ready.
The show was about to begin.
Surffilauta
The main streamer tactic employed here is part of the mystique of the lodge. The surffilauta, or “surfboard”, is tied to resemble a wounded baitfish struggling on the surface. A tinsel and craft-fur body is tied laterally along the hook shank beneath a slab of white foam, reminiscent of a gurgler.
As Jani describes it, “The bastard child of a streamer and a dry fly.”
These flies are usually dead-drifted through the turbulent whitewater of the main rapids, and the takes are violent and utterly unambiguous, with trout launching themselves clear of the water in desperate attempts to grab an easy meal before it whizzes overhead.
It was this action that Todd Moen’s infamous film had showcased, and now I had a front-row ticket to the real thing.
The first signs were subtle. A swirl here. A handful of bleak scattering there.
Pete gave me a nod and pointed towards the main current.
I gingerly waded into the faster water and, heeding his advice to keep casts short, fired my first shot. I high-sticked the drift, arm fully extended to keep as much fly line off the water as possible.
After a couple of drifts, it happened. A large trout exploded from the water beneath the fly.
My heart skipped a beat as I set the hook… into thin air.
With my adrenaline pumping, I put another cast in. Almost immediately, the water boiled as another fish slashed at the fly. I let it continue to drift downstream, and sure enough, the fish returned and hit the fly again, hard.
I set the hook and sighed with relief as I felt the weight of the fish coupled with a series of violent head shakes.
The trout darted for the main current and headed downstream. As I tried to manoeuvre myself after it, desperately navigating the rocks and boulders, the line suddenly went slack.
I cursed loudly.
It was then that I remembered Jani’s wise words from the induction meeting the day before.
When fishing the surffilauta, the action can be frenetic and intense, but because of the dead-drift technique, you are setting the hook much like you would a dry fly, trying to take up all the slack in the system that’s necessary for a good drift. You are not in direct contact with the fly as you are with other streamer techniques, and this makes converting those explosive takes into hook-ups surprisingly tricky.
There is another factor to consider, too. When a trout launches itself out the water in pursuit of the fly, it may not be trying to eat its prey immediately. Instead, it is attempting to stun it before circling back to collect the now-neutralised quarry.
With all this information racing through my mind, what followed was some of the most thrilling, yet frustrating streamer fishing of my life. I lost count how many fish I missed, setting the hook either too soon or too late, or having a fish on briefly before shaking loose.
Eventually, I tried to mix things up with an extra-fast retrieve, casting down and across and ripping the fly back as it swung downstream.
This was instantly rewarded with explosive eats, but as is often the case with a downstream presentation, few fish stayed pinned.
By now it was around 1am and still not fully dark. The sound of trout jumping and smashing baitfish was all around us, adding to the cacophony of the roaring rapids.
In this crepuscular light, I saw a trout that will haunt me forever.
Amongst the chaos of the feeding frenzy, about 15 feet away, I glimpsed a truly enormous fish leisurely breaking the surface like a dolphin. I have no way of knowing or verifying the true size of this fish, but there was something in the measured confidence of its movement, and the thickness of its shoulders, that stopped me in my tracks.
Surely this was one of Kellankoski’s famed 70cm-plus trophies?
Despite my best efforts and countless casts, I never saw the leviathan again, but knowing that fish like that were real, and not merely the stuff of fishing tales, was electrifying.
By the end of the “night”, at around 3am, I had managed only a couple of trout to the net, none of them huge. I had lost some exceptional fish, and had countless eats.
Ordinarily, I might have been disappointed with such a result, but I couldn’t wipe the grin from my face. The action had been exhilarating, despite the low conversion rate.
I made my way back to the bank and up onto the bridge, where I joined Jani as he gazed out over the churning rapids.
He chuckled as I recounted the night’s escapades and commented that it had actually been quite slow by their usual standards for that time of year.
Lower-than-average snowfall the previous winter, and therefore less snowmelt in the spring, had resulted in water levels significantly lower than expected. According to Jani, this had led to a somewhat subdued baitfish migration compared to previous years.
Regardless, he was pleased that I’d had such an enjoyable night.
My mind boggled at the thought of what the fishing must be like when everything is truly firing on all cylinders.
An Unexpected Encounter
Later, while making our weary way back to the lodge, fellow angler Michael was telling Pete how badly he wanted to see a moose during the trip. He had never seen one before, and Finnish roadsides are peppered with warning signs announcing their presence, so he fancied his chances.
Moments later, Pete suddenly slammed on the brakes.
“Moose!”
He pointed towards a roadside clearing, and sure enough, there it stood — not 15 metres away.
As we climbed out of the car for a better look, the outlandish ungulate considered us for a moment before rightly deciding that it had seen quite enough and bolted off into the forest.
Michael was fizzing with excitement, and so was I, and as we climbed back into the car, we all marvelled at our good fortune. A wonderful end to an incredible day.
Beyond the Streamers
The rest of the week played out in a similar fashion, with days spent relaxing, enjoying delicious local food, and nights spent out on the water.
I fished most of the beats on offer, including the titular Kellankoski itself, a narrower but immensely powerful set of rapids framed by dense forest, and a truly stunning location. Wading here was a little more treacherous, but thankfully there are a number of simple wooden casting platforms on both banks for those less inclined to brave the swirling currents.
Upstream lies Karinkoski, one of the most idyllic and tranquil places I’ve ever had the privilege of fishing. The rapid is shorter here but quite wide, with a much gentler pace, providing an expanse of superb dry-fly water and some incredible grayling fishing. During my evening here, the wind died completely and the surface of the lakes on either side of the rapids became mirrors, perfectly reflecting the surrounding landscape and the evening sky. I took this all in while releasing another obliging grayling, and it occurred to me that this might be the most serene and content I had felt in years.
And perhaps that was when I began to realise that Kellankoski Lodge was about far more than the explosive streamer fishing that had first drawn me here.
By the time our week inevitably drew to a close, most of the guests had landed some excellent fish, with numerous trout over 50cm and a couple of 60cm-plus monsters landed.
The huge trout had eluded me, but I had enjoyed a thoroughly memorable trip, and returned home with a new personal-best grayling.
Final Thoughts
It is clear what a unique and dynamic fishery Kellankoski Lodge is, with some truly exceptional trout and grayling on offer.
The surffilauta fishing is undoubtedly the headline act, but it is not without its nuances and challenges, and visiting anglers need to be prepared for that. In some ways, the lodge has become a victim of its own success in this regard. The spectacular topwater action has become so synonymous with Kellankoski that many anglers now pigeon-hole it as a specialist streamer destination. As a result, the prime summer weeks of the baitfish migration are booked well in advance.
That, I think, is a shame, because Kellankoski has so much more to offer.
There is superb dry-fly fishing in the spring and late summer, excellent grayling fishing, and an extraordinary variety of water to explore. For the coming seasons, the lodge is now offering discounted rates during these quieter periods to encourage more anglers to experience this side of the fishery, and it’s something I very much look forward to sampling when I return.
I came to Kellankoski chasing a particular image: a giant brown trout exploding through the surface to intercept my fly. And I did see that, several times, in fact. I felt the violence of the takes, the adrenaline of the chases, and the frustration of fish lost. I even saw a fish that, in the half-light, may well have been the largest brown trout I have ever encountered.
But the memories that stay with me most clearly are not just the big fish.
It’s standing in the glassy waters of Karinkoski, a perfectly serene Finnish evening reflected in its surface, as another grayling slips back into the gentle current.
It’s the warmth of a whisky after a long night on the water, and the laughter of anglers trying to work out how they’d managed to miss quite so many fish.
And it’s the knowledge that somewhere beneath those dark, churning rapids, enormous brown trout lurk, waiting for the next shoal of baitfish to arrive.
When I return, I’ll be hoping for another encounter with that leviathan, but I’ll be just as happy wandering the quieter reaches with a dry fly in hand, content simply to soak up the atmosphere and see what the waters choose to reveal.
For more information about Kellankoski Lodge please email Alistair Routledge, alternatively you can call our office on +44(0)1980 847389.
