Icelands salmon season is not that far away and in fact quite a few brown trout and sea trout locations will open on April the 1rst. We asked leading fisheries biologist Guðni Guðbergsson to tell us what to expect when the salmon come marching in, so to speak.
“If we start off by looking at the Northeast corner, the area had rather small grilse runs in 2018 due to the fact that there were too few salmon spawning in 2012. The juveniles hatched in the spring of 2013 were the smolts leaving the rivers in 2017, to make up the poor grilse runs in 2018. Besides, the rivers were very cold during the summer months in 2015, perhaps partially due to the volcanic activity in Holuhraun, north of Vatnajökull. Temperature conditions have since improved with 2018 being among the best, but the cold water in 2015 probably did the growing salmon juvenile’s little favours. Last spring saw more than one generation leave the rivers which is often the case when water temperatures have been favourable. According to research late summer 2018, juvenile stocks were in very good condition. There is a bond between grilse runs one year and multi winter salmons the following year as they tend to the same generation so we are not expecting large runs of multi winter salmons in 2019 although it must be said that their numbers have been increasing over the past years, most likely due to the marked improvement in catch and release in Icelandic rivers. Recent genetic data also tells us that heavy fishing for multi winter salmons makes them scarcer and we were seeing just that until a few years ago when they started to come back. Most multi winter salmon are females so their growing presence is showing in the number of juvenile salmons as the larger salmon spawn far more eggs than grilse.
Grilse are more prominent in the catch in the western part of Iceland, however the multi winter salmons are coming back there to. The generation of smolts leaving the rivers last year was average at best and in some places less than average. So it is fair to say that grilse runs will be average at best. Conditions since 2015 have been favourable although a very cold summer in the west last year did stunt the growth of salmon juveniles. Also, to be taken into account is the fact that the salmon growth in the first year in the ocean has been poor these last years off the west coast, poorer than average and that means more fatalities among the growing salmon. When speaking of the western part of Iceland, south coast rivers fit in. As for the northwest, the conditions there are about fifty-fifty compared to the northeast versus the western part of the country.