The first salmon have arrived!
A beautiful sight. Photo by Einar Falur.
With the salmon season closing in, the first rivers due to start on June 5th, avid anglers up here have been on the lookout for the first salmon. There have indeed been sightings!
It is perhaps difficult to judge if a spotted salmon is a retreating kelt or a fresh run fish, as both would typically be silvery and the kelts have been gradually leaving the rivers over the past few weeks. However one sighting in the river Korpa, one of our listed rivers, was thought to perhaps have been a fresh run fish. But it‘s hard to tell. One of our readers told us recently that he had seen several fresh salmon leaping by night off the coast at Straumsvík, in the southwest corner of Iceland, just south of the greater Reykjavík area. „I see them there every year at about this time, they are smelling the underwater river Kaldá that empties into Straumsvík, it‘s riverbed lying under the lava fileds. Most likely they are on their way further west and north to the bigger salmon rivers,“ he told us.
As it stands there most likely are some salmon already running. During the years of netting in the river Hvítá in Borgarfjordur, the first nets would be laid on May the 20th. Sometimes they caught more, sometimes less, but they always caught fish, the first running mws‘s. This was in the years before farmed salmon and these particular salmon were a very expensive luxury gourmet thing! After the nettng was stopped some 12 years ago, anglers fishing for sea trout have on quite a few occasions hooked up with salmon in this area from mid to late May. So the first salmon are most definately already here!
