Fly Fishing the Iceland Highlands

You might have noticed a lack of posts the last few weeks. We’ve been in Iceland on a photography tour and decided to add 2 days at the end of our trip to try fly fishing the Iceland highlands. I’ll share our short fly fishing experience, fishing for Arctic Char.

I booked this fly fishing trip with Go Fishing Iceland, which was one of the two choices our photography guide recommended. Since the primary purpose of this trip was sightseeing and photography, we decided to rent rods, reels, waders and boots and not mess with another suitcase filled with our own equipment. The 9 foot 5 weight Douglas rods with Orvis reels provided to us worked very well.

Did you notice the bobbers? Yup, we nymphed. Here are the flies our guide had. You’ll see several perdigon nymphs, which are popular there. The heavy weight allows the fly to sink faster.

Stefan Jones was our guide who picked us up at our hotel in Reykjavik and drove us to the river.

We arrived just after the season opened and chose to fish rivers instead of lakes. They recommended fishing the Kaldakvisl and Tungnaa rivers located in the highlands, about an hour and a half drive from Reykjavik.

Here is a map I created for our trip. The pins are hotels we stayed at during our trip. The yellow pin shows our hotel in the highlands.

We had access to a 16 mile beat on the Kaldakvisl River and this section is restricted to only four rods per day. We found wide open valleys surrounded by snow-capped mountains with waterfalls, volcanic rocks, little vegetation, and few people.

This river was fairly clear even with a large tributary flowing in, creating a spectacular low waterfall.

Our guide pointed out fish from the cliffs below the waterfall and we were able to sight fish for the Arctic Char.

The fish we landed were generally in the 3 to 6 pound range and most of their colors were spectacular.

The river was easily wadable, even at higher flows we experienced the first day. It didn’t take long for Dancingtrout to hookup.

And a short time later, I landed my first Icelandic Arctic Char.

It didn’t take long for another hook-up. I was able to capture it jumping out of the water.

And a closeup…

These were all solid fish. Here is Stefan holding one of my fish.

Happy guide!

All of our fish were caught with nymphs. We noticed a few Caddis flying around and Stefan tied on a dry fly with dropper, but no fish rose for the fly. Here are two flies that worked well.

Several fish were caught on the classic Pheasant Tail nymph.

After a lunch along the river, Stefan drove us a short distance to the Tungnaa River. It was higher and off color, but we gave it a try for a while but didn’t find any fish.

That was the end of day one fly fishing in Iceland. Since we were far from any small town, we stayed at the Hightland Center Hrauneyjar, which offers 51 rooms and has an onsite restaurant and coffee house.

The next morning, we returned to the Kaldakvisl.

To our surprise, the river level had dropped quite a bit, exposing more rock bars for us to wade on. The fish had dropped further downstream because of the water level.

It didn’t take long for Dancingtrout to hook another Arctic Char.

It was another beautiful Artic Char.

There were several more landed that day.

These Artic Char were beautiful fish.

After another lunch along the river, Stefan took us back to the Tungnaa River. The river had dropped quite a bit and he tried several spots.

Stefan told us the river has changed imensely since the dam was constructed. He showed us the normal water line, which was quite a bit higher than where we were fishing off the rocks.

This is a section each of us hooked and landed one fish. I felt fortunate we were able to do that.

In my experience, hooking and catching fish in dropping water conditions is very difficult. This day was no exception.

He tried a couple more “secret” spots, but we didn’t find any willing fish. It was 4 pm by then and we decided to call it a day.

We had a wonderful time with our first Iceland fly fishing adventure. Thanks Stefan!

Enjoy…go fish!