| Iceland Salmon Fishing |
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Page 3 of 3 
The author and Armann scoping out Eider Falls
Though no other fish has owned so passionate a coterie of devotees over the centuries, angling for Atlantic salmon remains a maddeningly inexact science. Among a raft of things unknown, in fact, is why fly-fishermen can catch them at all, since they don’t feed while in their spawning rivers. And because they don’t take flies out of hunger (as more accommodating fish do), all questions pertaining to which fly they will eat at any given time can be equally well answered by a tree stump as any expert. In fact, most Atlantic salmon fishermen might admit, if waterboarded, that the essence of their technique is chuck and chance, and that the good days they have are of as mysterious a provenance as the bad.
But then there are a very few anglers like my friend Peter Rippin, to whom Atlantic salmon fishing is not a science at all but an art bordering on sorcery. These few simply do not have bad days. If the fish are in the river, they catch them.
A bright and charming young Englishman, Rippin co-owns a company called Fly Fish Iceland, which arranges custom trips to some of the best salmon rivers and lodges in the country. After another operatic drive, Tom and I met up with him at one of those lodges, on the Nordura River, an hour north of Reykjavík. Among the most productive rivers in Iceland, the Nordura was already on its way to an all-time record season when we arrived, with more than 2,000 salmon caught from its roughly 37 miles of fishable water.
Our last stop was a half-hour down the road from the Nordura at the regal and historic Grimsa River. Traveling anglers have been enjoying the 66 named pools on the Grimsa since the 1870s, when visiting British sports were guided on it by the great-grandfather of Siggi Fjeldsted, the assistant manager of the lodge on the Grimsa and our guide during our time there. Siggi is a hearty 68. A fourth-generation Grimsa guide, he knows the river and its salmon intimately, and he is more than delighted to discuss them in a nonstop series of stories that unfold like Icelandic sagas—filled with women and booze, fish and horses, and the celebrities, wimps, and stalwarts he has guided over the decades. They are stories that assume an unhurried listener as well scarred by the pleasures and attritions of maleness and as contentedly fallen from grace as the bald, bearish, bashed-nose teller. If you are a hedge-fund manager with a BlackBerry addiction, Siggi might not be your cup of tea. But he was exactly mine, as was everything else about the Grimsa.
The current lodge, which replaced the original one in 1972, was designed by architect, angling writer, and bon vivant Ernie Schwiebert. It is one of the most handsome and agreeable lodges I have ever encountered, with comfortable bedrooms, bright, high-ceilinged living and dining areas, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the river, and a superb kitchen. It accommodates only eight rods, with the same generous and easy elegance with which the river fishes them, and the overall effect of the place is highly addictive. The Icelandic couples with whom we shared the lodge had been coming there the same week for 15 years.
 ACCESS Iceland air offers excellent nonstop service from Boston, New York (JFK), Orlando Sanford, and Minneapolis/St. Paul to Iceland’s capital city of Reykjavík (Read more...
Unfortunately, by the time we arrived at the Grimsa, eight straight days of the black dog’s company had put me into a hopeless, self-pitying torpor. Not even a feisty seven-pound salmon that jumped all over a stripped Sunray Shadow in Ernie Schwiebert’s favorite pool on our first evening could pull me out of it. While Peter continued to hoodwink fish after fish, I found myself—on this peerless river!—actually looking forward to the monster-jeep tour out of Reykjavík that we had scheduled for our last day in the country.
Evidently having seen this kind of unseemly fade before, Siggi knew exactly how I needed bucking up. At lunch on our second day, with only an evening and a morning of fishing left, he told me he wanted to show me something. After a 30-minute drive in his old Toyota truck, we pulled up in front of his ancestral house, home to four generations of Icelandic salmon addicts. There, hanging above a sofa in the living room, was the life-size wooden carving of Halldor’s legendary fish (sans bite marks).
After Siggi related to me the story of its capture, I felt as if I had been slapped on the sidelines by Woody Hayes and told in a shower of spit: “This is Atlantic salmon fishing in Iceland, buddy—the Rose Bowl of angling! Now get your sorry *** back out there and win one for Halldor.”
With reawakened passion and commitment—and questionable intelligence—I did just that.
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On our first evening, Peter added five salmon to that total and lost five more. Over the next day and a half, he caught an additional seven in difficult low-water conditions, getting recalcitrant salmon to bite by dead-drifting small, heavy flies tied to long, fine leaders right into their mouths. It was inspired, coruscating fishing, performed with such utter concentration that his face would fall into a trancelike slackness while he was at it. And it was a pleasure to watch, if—for me, anyway—impossible to duplicate.
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