Iceland part 2 – the South Coast & East Ranga

I drove down to the south coast, Hejkla showed its majestic siluett and I crossed the west Ranga before I came down to East. There are many things to be said about the Ranga rivers. Here the volcanic sand kills the row and the fish can’t spawn. Only in the few small tributaries there are some wild fish reproducing.

Ranga is a gigant sea-ranching project. Fish are taken, hatched and put back as smolts. The amount of fish coming back is of course depends on the hatchery program. It’s of course highly questionable and the great danger is that fisherman from around the world go to Ranga and then come back after great catches wanting to hatch also wild salmon rivers in different parts of the world. I heard this talk also this year, it’s time to hatch also the Scottish rivers. Terrible thoughts that will kill the wild fish in Scotland. We cannot fall into this trap! When it comes to Scotland, we need to fight the fish farming industry – not start with gen pollution through hatcheries just to get some more fish on our flies. We need to do things in the right sustainable way. It’s here the Ranga project is very questionable.

East Ranga is a fantastic diverse and exciting river to fish. This year the catches been record high and day catches been a bit ridiculous actually. I started on beat 3 which is one of the best beats. I fished a float 2 Nextcast with a sink 8 tip. Ranga is extremely cold coming down from the Vatnajökul glacier. A Dee Samurai gave me first fishes, wanting a bit deeper I changed to a Pahtakorva on a TTT. Well – crazy I landed 22 salmon the first afternoon.

Luckily a bit of rain colored up the river and made fishing more difficult. But summing up my 3 days gave me 40 + salmon, most of them grilse but also some good 2 sea winter fish. My biggest fish was 93, 90, 85 and 82 cm. Great salmon in the 7-8,5 kilo range.

To stay at the Lodge is a good experience. The East Ranga Lodge is a 5-star fishing lodge with 3 course dinners and over all a very luxury experience. I filmed and took lots of photos. Unfortunately when droning our drone was attacked by birds that actually was aggressive enough to smack it to the ground – shit! It was curlew with their big bills that killed it – so sorry but very few minutes of droning in the upcoming film.

I drove back to Keflavik with lots of fish to my rod and new experiences from wild rivers in the North and this very strange Ranga fish catching madness freshly on my mind.