She pulled then twisted the lever of the aircraft’s main cabin door allowing it to seal with pneumatic finality. The three crew, faintly smiling, faced the plane’s passengers as the formalities rolled on. Each wore a navy-blue pencil skirt, a matching jacket, a pill box hat with gold trim, sensible black shoes, an unadorned white cotton blouse, and an Icelandair lapel pin identifying them only as “Cabin Crew.” Each of the three was elegant and mature, wore her blonde hair pulled into a tight bun and could have been mistaken for a dancer. I was on my way back to Iceland, my fourth visit in the past fifteen years, and my second trip to Laxa i Adadal or, as it is commonly known, “The Big Laxa.”
Airborne and looking at about seven hours of flight time from Seattle, I inserted foam ear plugs and opened a recently published treatise delving into the Shakespeare “authorship question.” One of the cabin’s three graces placed before me a small Franklin and Sons Light Tonic and a square shouldered mini bottle of 64° Reykjavik Angelica Gin. Two thin lime slices swam in the icy translucence. This wonderful British invention was accompanied by a foil envelope of seasoned Greek olives. Within a short time, all the worries, consequent to the trip’s preparation, had evaporated, leaving me to anticipate the coming week.
For those who are travelling anglers, you already know the complexity of selecting the gear, choosing complementary layers of warmth, and assembling some semblance of acceptable dinner wear, all of which must be compacted into a roller duffle and not exceed stringent weight restrictions. I had gotten better at this and, over the years, have reduced the duffle from a massive (and expensive) sixty-five pounds down to a minimalist fifty. With the closure of that cabin door and the soothing drone of the jet’s engines, there was no further occasion for rumination.
It may have been memory’s myopia but my previous Julys in Iceland’s north had provided clement weather with morning coastal overcast, mild onshore breezes, and the threat of rain far enough away such that the wading jacket could have been left in the truck. Whether due to my faulty recall or this year’s extraordinary weather, July brought four degree C mornings, impatient clouds, moist air and penetrating north winds. So out of the duffle came four or five layers, just enough to banish the chill but not so much as to interfere with the complexities of double hand casting.
The lower Laxa, all well suited for a double handed rod, has been divided into six beats which extend nearly to the ocean, and fishing is limited to morning and evening sessions, creating midday and nighttime windows for fish to seek their upstream destination. The early afternoon pause also provided a welcome break for the anglers and guides.
On the second day and on a midriver beat, I stood astride a lava rock perch, as an seventy nine cm silver bar took my swimming #8 Dimmblá. Nothing tentative about this violent take. The headshaking male stayed down, then burst through the choppy surface in a series of three heart stopping jumps, before coming to net.
What immediately followed was that mysterious moment when all the chatter dissipates, and, however briefly, the mind and body become one. Now, as I try to understand this moment, I recognized its similarity a long-ago morning on the Eastern Litza when my ghillie netted a thirty-four pound cock fish , and mused if, in each, I had broached Conrad’s “shadow line.”
Fishless days are an inevitability, testing one’s fortitude and good nature. But patience can be rewarded. I was again knee deep and had worked my way down river to a spot, backed by a steeply pitched 8–10-foot grass covered embankment, which permitted an oblique cast to a small patch of smooth water at the foot of an island twenty-five yards distant.
The salmon erupted vertically, diagonally upstream from the visible tip of my fly line, attached to which was another ten feet of floating polyleader and four feet of stout Maxima. This didn’t look like the porpoising of a running fish, but I felt certain that the rise couldn’t have been in response to my subsurface Dimmblá. But my unflappable guide said, “Wait 30 seconds and make another perfect cast to that small glassy target.”
No pressure at all.
But the #12 Dimmblá landed on the glass and swam for 2-3 seconds when the line tightened and accelerated into the stiff current of the mainstem Laxa. As the fish gathered speed, I had nowhere to go but up over the vertical bank. My guide fashioned his left leg into a bench and, unafraid of my tungsten cleats, instructed me to push off his bent leg and climb up the face. The grass had shallow roots that gave way to my grasp, but the lava cliff face provided enough purchase that I emerged on top and was able to shepherd the eighty one cm female into downstream quiet waters and the guide’s waiting net.
None of this could have succeeded without the unspoken bond between angler and guide. Once the bright female was in the net, we both broke into broad smiles of relief admixed with joy. Later, back at the truck, a Primus stove propelled espresso which, mixed with Grand Marnier, cemented the memories.
There were other fish, each with its own story, as well as the lodge’s unique fraternal camaraderie. One of the group, a European restauranteur, was fêted in the celebration of Maria Lax, a festival for the deflowered salmon virgin. He was all smiles.
But the week had come to an end. At its heart, this trip and its experiences relive the words of W.L. Calderwood, as quoted in John Ashley Cooper’s book, A Line on Salmon, “So it seems that our front-line angler calls up from the depths of his hunting past some special qualities. He also lives in close touch with nature-in his case, with his sport; he is always thinking about it…He is getting to the heart of the matter…”
