Midfjardara: Wild is the future
Salmon fishing is fun.
Rafn Valur Alfreðsson, the outfitter of Midfjardara has put forward a new slogan that he and his people use as a benchmark for the future: „Wild is the future“. It is a combination of new marketing and a strong belief in how things should be done.
„Wild is the future“ means plain and simple that Nature is on its own on Midfjardara. The river is an excellent natural habitat for wild Atlantic salmon thus prompting Rafn Valur to do just the opposite to what many other outfitters and landowners in Iceland do, to varying degrees, deploy smolt releasing programs to up the runs and catches.
Fighting a big one on the tributary Austura.
Most of the most famous of those rivers are not listed on this website so we will not be commenting on them directly. It is though true that some of them have been registering new record catches every season for the last few years and the catch numbers are astonishing.
„We are lucky in the the way that the landowners of Midfjardara are not interested in this ploy. They agree with us that Nature should have its way and that anglers should give back in the way of releasing the bigger salmon and taking only moderate numbers of grilse from the rivers. We want to keep the genes in the rivers, having a purely natural fish stock and environment.
An inviting foss pool on Vestura.
What I dislike about the smolt releasing ,and there are many that are in agreement with me, is the fact that it is all to often poorly regulated and there are even examples of smolts from one river being secretly put into different rivers which is against regulations and tampering with genetic purety. However nobody is in place to regulate. This we don‘t like, so we stay away from it entirely,“ Rafn told us.
Midfjardara is indeed a natural salmon habitat. It has never had any level of smolt releasing, yet consistently been amoong the very best salmon rivers in Iceland.
