If you plan on hooking a world-class Atlantic salmon in heavy current, you better have your boots laced. Just ask the fly fisherman in the video below, who ran roughly a mile down a river in Norway chasing after a 45-pound fish. The giant salmon took him so far downriver so quickly that his guide had to hop in a vehicle just to catch up with them.
By the end of the clip, when the guide finally nets the fish in a pool, the fisherman drops to his knees on the rocks. He’s both exhausted and overwhelmed by the size of the salmon, which measured 129 cm (around 51 inches) by 66 cm (around 26 inches) and weighed 45.6 pounds, according to the post.
“This thing is so outrageously large,” the fisherman, Stephan, says to the video’s narrator, Marina Gibson, who’s recording the clip. Gibson had just caught up with him after driving down with the guide from where Stephan first hooked the fish. “It came flying … my line stopped completely, and it’s like ‘what the f*ck is this?!’”
Stephan continues on a brief and incoherent rant about how hard and fast the fish’s initial run was. He can’t stop dropping F-bombs. The video then cuts to the guide netting the fish as Stephan jogs along the gravel bar, rod raised high, to keep it out of the main current. More F-bombs follow when the fish hits the net.
The “ginormous” Atlantic salmon, to borrow Stephan’s phrase, is an absolute unit of a sea-run fish. The spotted buck is colored up like a brown trout and entering its spawning phase, with a massive kype jaw and a tail so thick that Stephan can’t fit his hand around it. In a comment on the Instagram video, Stephan (@theflyfishingnation) says they released the fish after it was handled “with utmost care” by the guides. Unlike Pacific salmon, which all die after spawning, Atlantics can go from the ocean and up their natal rivers and back to spawn multiple times.
“Again: this is not a brown trout, not a taimen, not a king salmon,” Stephan clarifies in his comment. He says it took a Red Francis, a traditional wet fly that imitates a prawn and dates back to the 1960s.
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Releasing Atlantic salmon is standard in Norway, as it is in most other places where the species can still be targeted. Atlantics are classified as critically endangered throughout most of their range, including in Scandinavia, and there is a pretty intense catch-and-release ethic around these fish. (The comments in the above video are a good example, as a few critics pile on Stephan for simply holding the fish for a photo over the rocks. These criticisms are mostly overblown.)
Olderø Fly Fishing Lodge, the outfitter that Stephan was fishing with, practices catch-and-release only for Atlantic salmon. The high-end lodge is based in Finnmark, where anglers pay big money to access fully private stretches of the Lakselv River. The fish there are caught exclusively on flies using big, two-handed Spey rods. Many anglers, and especially students of the swung fly, consider this a pinnacle experience, and the rivers of Scandinavia are some of the last, best places on Earth to target huge Atlantic salmon. According to its website, Olderø is already full for the 2026 salmon season and the lodge is currently booking for 2027.
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