How to buy fish at the beach?

We head to the small fishing town of Thorup Strand. We find a parking lot not far from the beach – it is virtually empty during this time of the year I guess it would be another story in July but on this spring day with closed borders there is virtually nobody at the beach.

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We start walking down to the beach and as we get down there we pass a fairly large building which is sort of a mini factory where they cut up the catch of the day before it is transported to other destinations to be sold or further processed. We ask if they will sell any fresh fish to us over the counter but they say no and we have to ask one of the fishermen down at the beach which might still be offloading the catch of the day.

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We head down to the beach it is actually a bit of an industrial beach with a lot of fairly large fishing boats sitting on the beach. The fishing boats are pulled out of the water after each time they have been out fishing by a fairly large wire. There are warning signs telling you to stay clear of the wire when it is working since it is dangerous to get caught in the wire. They are not pulling any boats up for the moment so we can walk safely down to the boat they have already pulled up on the beach.

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We meet an old fisherman as we walk along the beach and ask if we can buy fish somewhere – he speaks with a strong local dialect but we manage to understand what he is saying. He is telling us to ask Christian who is currently unloading his boat. We head down to the boats and spot Christian he is busy unloading a lot of fish to tractors which will drive the fish from his boat to the small factory building we had just passed.

We try to ask him and it sounds like he is saying wait a minute in his strong northern Jutland dialect. We wait and watch as he unloads his catch of fish. It is a lot of rødspætter which is a very common flatfish caught in Danish waters with red spot on the back hence the name which translates into red spotted. He finally finishes unloading his fish and then he takes off the factory without selling us fish. I don’t know if there is a language difficulty with my Copenhagen capital Danish and his strong dialect – or maybe he just doesn’t want to sell to tourist. We don’t get any fish and decide to give up and just have a last look around the boats at the beach before we head back to the car.