August kicked off with – you guessed right – fishing: the last time I went to the “big” Amblève was almost 3 months earlier (when the leaves were not yet fully out), so it was about time for a revisit. After a few weeks of dry fly action, this time the surface activity was almost completely absent… I have only seen two rises the whole day, and prospecting casts with the dry fly were mostly left drifting without a reaction from below, except for two takes. (In the small Amblève I saw more fish reacting to the dry fly, but it was late, and as usual with smaller fish, I missed or they missed except for one brownie.) Luckily this time I decided to have also my Euro nymphing rod with me, and that was the winning formula for the day. The fish that were absent from the slower sections were present around structures and right behind the rapids. After finding the good spots, I managed to catch a good number of fish (18 trout in total, 2 of which were rainbow trout, and the rest brownies as usual). I even caught a crayfish by accident :D The largest fish of the day was one of the two rainbows; not a giant but still a strong fish of 36 cm that produced some nice jumps and a run downstream.

On the 8th we flew to Norway, where we stayed until the 21st. This was our second proper holiday of the summer, and it turned out even better than Slovenia. It has been the 3rd time in 4 years that we choose Norway (and as I am writing this, we have already booked another two weeks for 2026 too), and we were never disappointed. Less than 2 hours after landing in Oslo and picking up the rental car we were already on the edge of my favourite Norwegian national park, on our way to the Atna valley. I picked this region from the map for our first week because of its proximity to the Rondane National Park, and because this area seemed to contain a variety of different waters with plenty of different structure, while being somewhat similar in size and volume to what I have already encountered in Belgium and Slovenia. As soon as we arrived to our first lodge, I decided to test the waters just behind our cabin. The river looked amazing (although a bit deeper and colder than expected), I could immediately spot some fish, and it did not take long until the first brown trout took my dry fly! The first ones were small, but I was already happy. On this first day (or rather 2 hours in the evening) I caught 8 trout, 5 on the dry fly (the largest around 30 cm) and 3 with the Euro nymph rig – the holidays were off to an excellent start.