Salmon fishing!



The Gloppen Hotel

Well we have just been lucky enough to be invited on a salmon fishing trip. From Sunday to Wednesday we were in the village of Sandane, staying at the Gloppen Hotel, a lovely wooden building built in 1866. The good salmon fishing in the Gloppen river has been an open secret since the 1860's when the well-heeled lords and rich entrepreneurs of the Victorian era travelled here from all over Europe to fish.

So we joined an impressive line of salmon fishers to try our hand at it, and despite the complete lack of technique and knowledge, guess what both Trevor and I caught one! So now we have 8kgs of wild salmon safely ensconced in the hotel freezer waiting to be smoked for Christmas!

I must admit, it is extremely restful standing beside a fast flowing river casting a line. We tried fly fishing (caught a lot of grass and bushes behind me until I finally managed to get the knack!) and fishing with a spinner. A spinner is a flashy fish shaped hook which wriggles through the water as you reel in the line, like some kind of monstrous shiny cockroach – apparently appealing (or not) to fish. The river was high and fast flowing, so I wasn’t so comfortable standing up to my hips in water casting a line, so most of the time I stayed on the bank, which felt much safer!

There was a down side though - no-one else in our party caught one, and the hotel owners and those who own the fishing rights along the river are worried as stocks have dwindled noticeably over the past three years. The salmon are just not making it up the rivers to spawn, and sports fishing went down from 50 fish on the Gloppen river in 2011 to 35 in 2012 and 16 so far this year.

As a result, there is a lot of monitoring going on. Every fish caught has to be weighed, measured, checked for lice and a scale sample sent for analysis. Assessments are being made, together with local fishermen as to how many fish there might be in the river, and whether fishing should continue or not. This year, the Government has got even more involved and decreed that the wild salmon fishing season must finish two weeks early, i.e. by 15th August.

Exactly why numbers have dropped is not entirely understood, although a sharp decline in the numbers of medium and large sized wild salmon coming to the Norwegian coast has been recorded since the 1980's. The Russians, Finns and other Baltic states have also noticed a decline in stocks.

The consensus is that the wild salmon are dying when out at sea for some reason. The Russians also complained bitterly in 2007/8 that Norwegian sea fishermen were fishing far too many wild sea salmon before the salmon had had a chance to gut to their home rivers (salmon always return to the river they were spawned in to spawn themselves). There have also been issues with salmon and trout fish farms which pollute the water in the fjords with excess nutrients and sewage from the tanks. Lice infestation is common amongst the fish on the fish farms and antibiotics are used to treat them. The lice though get into the water and infect the wild fish too. If a fish gets infested with too many lice it will die, and this is particularly a problem for the young fish or smolts.

So, now I know all this, I feel a little guilty that as a family we caught two beautiful fish, yet as my husband says, 'you've got to eat!' How long though can this state of affairs continue? Maybe there will have to be a stop on all river fishing for wild salmon at some point for a few years, in order to see if the situation can improve. There are plenty of brown trout out there to catch - they don't seem to have been affected by changes in the ecologic system at all.