Three on the same cast!
A sea trout above and the "laxbirtingur" below. The hybrid looks very much like a salmon but the tell tale are the markings on the dark part of the gillcovers. Other "Laxbirtingar" look more like sea trout and sometimes not one in a group is in any way identical. Photo by Heimir Óskarsson.
Only a week until the season starts up here and already a few people are looking at the rivers “checking” if there is some life to be seen. And how goes it? Things are indeed looking good. Thorarinn Kristinsson, the owner and outfitter of Tungulaekur tried his most trusted spring pool for an hour, and his assumption: “Things are normal”.
In fact is it as if spring is a motnh early this year, March is traditionally one of the more wicked winter months as it has been cold and snowy over the decades although the lengthening days keep people rembering that spring is around the corner. This year March has felt like April, and hopefully April will feel like May. It is to be hoped though, that June will feel like June and the same with July and August.
Local anglers are starting to swarm all over the tackle shops, mostly purchasing cone headed streamer flies and fast sinking leaders, which for the most part are the norm for April fishing in Iceland. Thorarinn could just not wait, as he told us that his annual very late run of 2 to 6 pound juvenile sea trout weren't running when they should have been last year. “I was really worried. Even by Christmas they still were not there. However sometime between then and now they have obviously arrived as the bottom pool was stacked with them. I hooked fish after fish for a while and there were sometimes several following the fly at the same time. On one cast I actually landed the third fish that struck. I took two of them back home for the barbecue, one of them an interesting fish that we call “laxbirtingur” in Icelandic. It does not translate well to English, but in short, it is a hybrid between a salmon and a sea trout.
They are well known on the river although they perhaps cannot be said to be common. They vary in the way some resemble the sea trout more, other the salmon, all according to weather a sea trout or a salmon was the mother or father. It is the common theory that the cramped spawning grounds are behind this, as spawning sea trout and salmon side by side tend to shake together this strange cocktail. These hybrids are not spawners and some have been known to run up to 10 to 12 pounds,” Thorarinn told us.
