Record year for Iceland's salmon

I had lunch at the Flyfishers’ Club in London today with Orri Vigfusson, who is over in the UK this week to raise funds at an annual auction for the North Atlantic Salmon Fund.

If Iceland’s economy is suffering, the same cannot be said for its Salmon fishing which can report another record breaking year, besting the previous record set in 2005 by some 25,000 fish.

The 2008 grand total for salmon caught on rod and line in Iceland is 82,000 (with one or two rivers still to report), a staggering increase on the 55,168 caught in 2005.

Why the big increase? Orri believes that much of the success can be put down to the end of netting at sea, achieved over the past 15 years in a succession of net buy-outs by the fund.

Monster salmon

Another reason, he suggests, is that the salmon are ranging more northerly where they could be finding good stocks of krill, sand eels and capelin. “We have had many more larger fish in the rivers this year,” he says.

The same seems to be true in Norway and anecdotally, at least, in Scottish rivers (Scotland takes somewhat longer to produce annual fishing returns). Norway’s river Alta, known for its big fish, had about 70 salmon weighing more than 40 lbs this year and 15 over 50lb. The Gaula meanwhile had 70 fish topping 35 lbs.

A monster salmon of 82½ lbs was caught in nets in the sea close to the Alta estuary. Imagine hooking that on your size 12 Ally’s shrimp with a 20 lb leader.

Fish ranching

These bigger fish are great news. But the improvements don’t end there. If you look more closely at the Icelandic returns you find that 30,000 of this year’s total were caught as a result of what Orri calls “ranching” but what most of us would know as river stocking.

Stocking policies on the East and West Ranga rivers have created salmon runs where none existed before. Salmon do not breed in these rivers naturally. Yet these two rivers alone accounted for more than 21,000 rod-caught salmon this year, more than two-thirds of the total caught as a result of stocking.

Survival rates are improving too on these rivers. In the past a 1 per cent return rate has been considered the norm from stocking but this year the return rate was 7.5 per cent.

Hatcheries closed

This would seem a powerful argument for maintaining hatcheries on rivers. On the River Dee in Scotland, however, hatcheries have been closed to divert conservation funds towards habitat improvement.

This seems a mistaken policy. Rivers such as the Dee need both stocking and habitat improvement to return their stocks to levels that could be classed as abundant.

Before we start to become complacent about these successes it’s worth noting that maintaining the net buyouts costs about £400,000 a year. In the last four years the NASF has raised between £700,000 and £800,000 annually enabling it to buy out more nets but the future is likely to be focused on maintaining the status quo.

While I hope that Orri Vigfusson maintains his considerable energy for many years to come, there will come a time when his specialist skills of negotiating with netsmen in the Faroe Islands, Greenland and elsewhere will need to be undertaken by others.

Future plans

It’s important now that salmon anglers and supporters of the fund begin to think about the legacy of this work. Orri says that in the next two or three years he wants to build a capital fund for the future. But it’s important too that the fund maintains its businesslike character and reputation for getting things done.

I’m not sure that any one individual will be able to replace his remarkable persistence in taking the NASF campaign to those who can make a difference. But the straightforward “capitalist solution” to conservation that he introduced has cut across the sometimes grindingly slow and ineffective lobbying of some conservation groups. Long may it continue.