Atlantic Salmon in Norway

Atlantic Salmon in Norway
by Jonathan Boulton

When guiding someone on new water or helping a beginner to throw a nice tight loop you inevitably go through a rough patch. A frustrating period when your client or prospective syndicate member thinks you are showing them the most pretty piece of water except for the fact that there ain’t no fish in it! The same feeling when Mr Jones and his new 2 weight his wife bought for their anniversary is doing more damage to the bank-side vegetation than a brush cutter in the wrong hands and you hear him mumble "wonder which new putter I could buy if I flogged this damn rod second hand?" It’s at trying times like these I try to reassure people with the profound words "c’mon, if it was that easy every Tom Dick and Harry would be flyfishing!"

But there is frustration and then there is Atlantic salmon. The king of fish as they are known as in Norway, will show themselves, head and tail or leap clear of the water but will not take the fly, then suddenly as if someone has flicked a switch they will eat your fly, sometimes as delicately as a Koi Carp sipping floating pellets, other times more aggressively than an Ignoblis Kingfish on crack!

Now I’d like to tell you about Salmon fishing, but don’t worry it’s not for a minute going to be one of those "the light flickered mystically on the water and the only sound that disrupted the silence was the protesting scream of my real as the fish headed downstream…" It’s also not going to be one of those highly technical: what fly pattern tied to what tippet with what knot presented on what weight rod, with a full moon, north easterly wind and timed carefully with the emergence of a one eyed, left handed nocturnal water vole! I don’t do those and I don’t enjoy reading them that much. I will just try to give you some insight into what intrigues me about this magnificent fish, its amazing biology, the history in the quest for its capture and its dam right fickleness to take a fly.

Well where to start, you can’t help but feel for these fish, the odds are just stacked against them from the word go. Being so highly sought after to get slapped onto brown bread with black pepper and lemon juice all over the world just doesn’t bode well. Long drift nets take heavy tolls on the offshore feeding grounds, as do commercial netters net in the Fjords and estuaries as the fish migrate up stream to spawn every year. Public fishing on the lowland stretches of the rivers often mean spinning and bait fishing anglers bombarding the water relentlessly and if all that is not enough the migrating fish have to contend with physical boundaries including not only natural waterfalls and rapids but often man made weirs and ladders.

I could never understand why catch and release for Atlantic Salmon in Europe was virtually non existent and this was emphasised by the look on my guides face on the Gaula River in Norway this July. After tying on my sparsely dressed Stout’s tail (kindly tied up for me by Mike Peterson of Hairy Fairy) I proceeded to squash the barb when he blew a gasket rattling off something not too pleasant in Norwegian. After simmering down, he explained himself in the impeccable English that all continental Europeans are sickeningly capable of churning out. He basically pointed out that with what the Salmon have to go through to get up to the spawning grounds the resultant numbers are pretty sad. Details kept by the Norwegian Flyfishers Club base lodge dating back to 1988 are pretty terrifying. Up to 75% of the fish landed have net markings on. In other words they have escaped from the nets - imagine the numbers that actually get caught!!!

Those that do get into the upper reaches where the flyfisherman predominate are infamously difficult to tempt with the fly. You may cover a fish several times but it will just ignore the fly. If you are lucky enough to eventually provoke a take there is a pretty good chance that the hook will not hold due to the sometimes very soft take and then the reputable acrobatics and dogged fight that lies ahead. Bearing in mind a weeks salmon fishing, not including accommodation, flights and car hire can cost around 900 pounds, it is not surprising that a beached salmon is going to be unquestionably destined for the smoker. I’m not for a minute advocating this frame of mind, but you can understand where the locals are coming from. Surprisingly even with the meagre amount of mature fish that get up into the spawning grounds, the number of surviving smolts that make it out to sea are very high and it is therefore evident that the greater part of the problem is the indiscriminate offshore netting that occurs.

The en vogue Atlantic Salmon destination at the moment is the old Soviet Union. Efficient North American style lodges with exceptional guides operate on the Ponoi River on the Kola Peninsula. Here 30 fish per rod day is not blinked at with fishing running from 6 - 20lbs. The difference here is the fact that the Russian government has recognised recreational angling as such a valuable asset ($10 000-00 US) per rod week that they have acted efficiently to ensure its protection which is unusual for a country which doesn’t have the greatest environmental history! The exact location of the feeding grounds off Iceland have been kept a state secret and ex KGB agents are even employed to ensure it remains so! In comparison Britain’s Salmon fishing has deteriorated incredibly, major conservation legislation is being passed to try and improve fishing, but offshore netting all in the name of a sharing European Community is taking the greatest toll. Local governments are buying up the netting licenses of local estuary netters on famous rivers like the Dee and instead of them just putting the netters out of work they are being employed as Ghillies (guides). However this summer saw some of Britain’s worst fishing in history, and by the time I had left in August the river Wye, possibly one of the most famous British Salmon rivers had produced 2 rod caught fish!

This is a long cry from a historically documented written protest from English farm labourers that they were sick to death of Salmon, as it was so common that it made up their entire daily ration!!!

Taken from
Flyfishing: The Official Journal of the Federation of Southern African Flyfishers Vol 12 No. 52 April/May 1999

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