I was on fire for you, where did you go?

In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one

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A T the risk of sounding unpatriotic —our Scottish waters have been unusually kind to me this summer —I reckon if you want to be sure of casting over pools full of Atlantic salmon, then Iceland is the place to go (it boasts almost 100 salmon rivers; not bad for a country with the same population as Stoke-on-Trent.)

Of course, there is nothing new in this. Wellheeled sportsmen have been visiting ‘the land of ice and fire’ since Victorian times; the Revd Sabine Baring-Gould, author of some 240 books, noted that most of the Englishmen he met there in 1859 were anglers (he enjoyed the local whimbrel stew, too). Ultima Thule has long had a reputation for being distinctly dif- ferent; in the 1870s, Matthías Jochumsson noted that his homeland had ‘no army, no apples, no atheists, no gallows, no hydro- phobia, no monks, no monkeys… and no nobility’. Yet Iceland does have lots of geothermal energy— and fish. The cost of sport here can be stratospheric, but, in July, I sold the family silver and joined a party on the fabled silvery runs of the Midfjardará river.

On the drive north-west from the airport, none of my fellow rods seemed impressed by the eight salmon I’d already grassed that week in Sutherland (strange, that). Eventually, after several hours of moss-covered outcrops and cindery rhyolite cliffs with snow still blotching the upper slopes, we arrived at the shipshape Laxa Hvammur Lodge where the landscape was less forbidding. There were none of those sculptural, orc-like lava fields and a four-river system offered more than 200 pools for visiting fly-fishers.