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About the site

About Finnfisk

A field guide to inland fishing in Norway: where the waters are, what has been recorded in them, what to bring, and what tends to work when. Built on datasets that can be checked, and open about where those datasets stop.

Verify locally

Regulations, seasons, size limits and licences change and vary from water to water. Everything here is advisory and must be confirmed with the rights holder or in the regulation before you fish. If you doubt a figure on a page, it is the figure that is wrong, not the rule.

What this is

Finnfisk gathers what you would otherwise hunt for in five places: where the water is, what fish have been recorded in it, whether anyone sells a licence there, what the weather is doing right now, and what tends to catch fish. The map covers the whole country, and the guides cover what holds wherever you are standing.

51,321
named lakes
The lakes NVE holds a name for, spread over the municipalities. The map has the rivers as well.
350
municipality pages
One page per municipality with named lakes at NVE. Randaberg, Kvitsøy, Træna, Røst and Værøy have none, and have no page. Herøy and Våler are two municipalities each, with one page per name.
3,073
waters with a licence offer
Waters with a fishing-card offer on inatur within 2.5 km.
132
curated spots
Spots with a page of their own: access, depth, species and season.

All of it works without an account, and the map and the guides work without signal too.

Open the map

What it is not

  • Not the rules themselvesNothing here replaces the regulation for the watercourse or the terms set by the rights holder. Where those say something else than this site, they are the ones that count.
  • Not a verdict on where to fishThe map holds every named water from NVE, but only 132 spots are curated and written out in detail. They were picked because they are reachable and because their rules can actually be worked out, not because they are the best in Norway.
  • Not a report to anyoneThe catch log is your own. Nothing from here goes to any authority, and where the watercourse requires a catch report, you still have to file it yourself.
  • Not your position leaking outThe log stays on the device until you sign in, and a point becomes public only when you put a fish on the wall or share a trip yourself. The position is then rounded to about 200 metres by the server, not by the browser.

Where the numbers come from

Every page is assembled from named datasets, so a figure can be traced back to something you can look up yourself.

The waters

Every named water and main river comes from NVE’s lake database and river network, with elevation, area and the watercourse it drains to. None of it is drawn in by hand.

The species

The species in a water are records from Artskart, and the per-municipality counts are the same records tallied through GBIF. That means “the species has been seen here”, not “there is a lot of it here”.

The licences

The licence offers are plotted from inatur’s open layer and matched to the waters they cover, so a water can show that a licence exists. The licence itself, its price and its terms still live with whoever sells it.

The weather

Wind, temperature, pressure and sun times are fetched from Open-Meteo when you open “Right now”, and fill themselves into the catch log once you have signal again.

The advice

The guides, the colour choices and the feeding times are experience put in order and read against the sources below. They are rules of thumb that hold often enough to be worth following, not laws.

The line that is not crossed

No rule is derived from data. Size limits, quotas, seasons and closed periods are set per rights holder and per county, and cannot be computed from a water register. So the pages point at the regulation and the licence seller instead of paraphrasing them.

Sources

Every source is listed here, in the order they are used. The public registers are linked, because their page is the document you would actually read. The rest are named without a link, and deserve the credit just as fully.

The regulations

  • Lovdata, lakse- og innlandsfiskeloven § 18, Children’s right to fish inland fish free with rod and hand line, and the exceptions to it.
  • Miljødirektoratet, The state fishing fee: who it applies to, and which fishing it does not cover.
  • Statsforvalteren i fylket ditt, Seasons, closed periods and other regional provisions live in the county regulation, not in any national figure.
  • Norsk Friluftsliv, What the right to roam covers, and where it stops once you are fishing.

The waters and the fish

  • NVE, The lake database and river network: every named water and every named main river in Norway, with elevation, area and watercourse. The depth maps on the map come from the lakes NVE has surveyed.
  • Artsdatabanken, Artskart, Which species are actually recorded in a water, from NINA and Vannmiljø fish surveys.
  • GBIF, The same occurrence records counted per municipality. They are records, not population estimates: they say the species has been seen there, not how much of it there is.
  • SSB, KLASS, The municipality register: which municipality belongs to which county, and the mergers going back in time.

Map and weather

  • Kartverket, The basemap, topograatone and topo.
  • Open-Meteo, Wind, temperature, pressure and sunrise behind “Right now”, and the weather that fills itself into the catch log.
  • Esri, Maxar og Earthstar Geographics, The aerial imagery layer in the map.

Licences and experience

  • inatur, The fishing licence offers plotted here, and the zones around them. The licence itself you buy from inatur or from the rights holder.
  • Fjellstyrene og statsallmenningene, The licences for mountain fishing, often sold directly by the mountain board rather than through a portal.
  • Sølvkroken, Lure and colour advice, read alongside what actually catches fish in the waters the guides cover.

Privacy

Google Analytics loads only if you accept cookies. Your IP is anonymised, the data is not used for ads, and no tracking happens before you say yes.

Catches, your own spots and favourites live on your device. Sign in and they sync to your account so they follow you to the next phone. Delete the account and they go with it, immediately. Your account

The full text, naming who is responsible, how long things are kept and how to get your data out, has a page of its own. Privacy · Terms

Who and where

Finnfisk is made by Whiterose. Questions, a wrong figure or a spot that has closed? Send an email and it gets fixed. bjarne@oever.li