Vatnsdalsa: New record, up by one!
While observers were watching a host of other river break their previous records or come close to doing so, Vatnsdalsa crept up silently as a potential contender. And on the final morning of the season, the record was broken by one solitary salmon!
Outfitter Petur Petursson told us that the outlook was pretty bleak as the final morning of the season dawned, as heavy overnight rains had flooded the river. It was colored, very high and generally unpassable, except via bridges, and hardly wadeable. “We needed three fish to break the record at that point, and the anglers went about their work. In the end we made it, we got the three fish and have a new record, upping the old one by one salmon! The old record was 1.388 salmon in 1986, the new record one better. There is another marked difference making this record all the more important. In 1986 the river was fished with worms and spinning along with fly fishing and a lot of parr and smolts were put in the river to enhance the runs. Since 1997 there has been catch and release only, fly fishing only and no juvenile salmon put in the river. Nature is on its own in Vatnsdalsa and is doing quite a good job of it.
Over one third of the Vatnsdalsa catch are heavy and healthy mws's, however there have been fewer huge fish, the 20 plus pounders that the river is well known to produce. Yet, one of the final days of the season produced a true Vatnsdalsa giant, a 108 cm cock fish caught on a local fly, Ofsaboom, in the pool Vaðhvammur. The local length chart says that an 108 cm salmon is just under 12,5 kilos, or just under 25 Icelandic pounds. Following an hour of pulling from both ends, the angler stranded the monster and snapped his rod in the process. He then found out to his horror that he had forgotten his camera in the lodge. His partner made a run for the car to get some storing plastic in order to half fill it with water in the hope that they could keep the salmon alive until they could find a camera and a scale in the process but the salmons girth was such that it wouldn't fit into the plastic, that is in fact made for storing salmon! So they had little option but to let it go without further delay! It is not only Vatnsdalsa's biggest of the season, but one of Iceland's biggest of the season.
The above photo is from the website www.vatnsdalsa.is and shows a typical Vatnsdalsa mws female salmon, weighing somewhere within 12 to 14 pounds.
