Varma River, Iceland

Varmá River, Iceland

Technical Pocket Water Fishing for Thermal Trout

Iceland is a smoldering volcanic island; a geological wonder perched on top of a substratum of boiling magma right where the North American and Eurasian continental plates move in opposite directions. Along this fault line, where everything gets pulled apart in endless slow-motion, heat erupts constantly from the core of the earth. It is in this region of tectonic turmoil that a meandering river has found its course.

by Rasmus Ovesen

photos by Rasmus Ovesen & Martin Ejler Olsen

SEATROUT have have always struck me as an utterly noble, fish. I grew up fly fishing for seatrout along the windswept coastal shorelines of Denmark. I’ve toiled and grinded away blindly, cast tenaciously for hours on end and in all manner of harsh weather, covered square meter after square meter of seemingly endless surface area in the ocean and fjords, and worked continually with patience, motivation, and stamina. I’ve handled my Sisyphean task with both stoicism and discipline. Every nagging speck of doubt I’ve dismissed with the uncritical zeal of a religious fanatic.

The Search for Meaning

Fly fishing for coastal seatrout sometimes borders on meaninglessness. You’re up against some sort of superior force embodied by a divinely beautiful silvery fish so elusive and ghost-like. They are evasive and so few in numbers compared to the endlessly vast expanses of the ocean, that only a special form of fanatical madness can make an otherwise rational person spend the best years of his life in pursuit of one.

Who knows? Maybe there’s meaning in all the madness: In the thunderous miracle that transpires when the line comes tight and connection is established to the higher powers despite all odds. I guess I have always believed so, and, as a result, coastal fly fishing for seatrout has come to symbolize and epitomize the fact that even the most hopeless of dreams can come true.

Willingness to Take Risks

I’m a dreamer and I’ve always been willing to take great risks (as long as the potential rewards have been proportionately great). I love the thought that I deserve every single fish I catch on the coast, and that every fish represents a victory over impossible odds. But does seatrout fishing really have to be so darn difficult to make sense? Who knows? As I sit on a plane traveling to Reykjavik one late September afternoon, headed for new seatrout adventures, my head has very little capacity for philosophical thoughts. It’s just daydreaming and fantasizing. Via Keflavik, I transfer to River Varmá in the Hveragerdi area – a place known for its many thermal springs. Here, my fishing buddy, Martin, and I will spend three days fly fishing for seatrout. The Varmá River, which compared to the salmon rivers I fish in Norway is quite small, is said to be full of migratory seatrout that amass in the sporadic pockets, runs, and pools found on the upper beats. Foreshadowed by a pocket water fishery with the possibility of big, bold, and aggressive seatrout fighting over the best holding spots, any other (reasonably sane) seatrout fisherman would be ecstatic. But I can’t help but feel a little unnerved…

Too Easy?

We arrive in Hveragerdi at night. The next morning, we wake up to the droning noise of heavy rain drumming statically on our roof. I haven’t slept very well and my head is heavy and tired. It feels as if I’ve been half-awake all night with some unformulated worry, but now something is dawning on me. Can it really be true? Am I nervous that the fishing is going to be too easy; that it’s going to feel like cheating –like shooting fish in a barrel?

Full of shapeless expectations we arrive at River Varmá. It meanders snake-like and silent below us, flanked by jagged cliff formations and undulating lush-green hills from which steep columns of thermal fume sporadically rise up toward the lead-grey and rain-laden skies. In the diluted and vibrating gloom of the first morning light, a shimmering haze towers above the river’s fleeting, thermal water masses -looks like a ghostly bridal veil and for a short period of time I forget all about my silly worries. I’m too focused on finding out what lurks beneath the surface to think about anything else.

Clay-coloured Water

A fishless hour later it’s light enough for us to actually see the water we’re fishing. The river is gorgeous and alluring with its varied course and numerous pools, runs, and lies. The surrounding area is typical Icelandic in all it’s strikingly beautiful desolateness with characteristic hilly terrain and open moss-clad plains grazed by myriads of sheep.

The water, for the time being, has a slight clay color to it, and the visibility is around half a meter. The conditions, in other words, look encouraging, but with the prospects of massive rainfalls in the next couple of days, they might not stay that way. They might become a bigger challenge than we’re capable of tackling. We head further upstream in intensifying heavy rain and find an interesting looking spot along a natural terrain plateau where the river licks greedily against a steep slope along the opposite bank and the water is decelerated before a sudden plummet further downstream. Using big streamers, we cover the whole stretch carefully but to no avail. It’s unclear why the fishing appears so futile, but it’s clear that the river reacts quite dramatically to the local rainfalls. The water levels are rising, and the river is becoming more and more turbid.

Challenge Accepted

With the ongoing and expected weather conditions and the resolute way the river reacts to the downpours, it feels as if Nature is conspiring against us and that we’re in a race against time. We keep fishing, but with nothing to show for our efforts –when doing so long enough, the mind tends to wander.

If we hadn’t booked and paid for three days of fishing on the river, we might already have started to think in alternatives. Instead, we choose to deal with the situation and accept the challenge. We set aside our streamer rods for a bit, started brainstorming, and came up with a new strategy. Moments later, when I rig up my nymphing rod, well aware that it’s going to be anything but easy to succeed, I’m all tingling inside. It feels as if there’s now something significant at stake!

A Heavy Tug

The same stretch of river now gets another well-deserved run through, this time with a 9’ 4-weight fly rod, and a 6-meter-long leader with two weighted nymphs attached to the end of the tippet. I start at the opposite end of the stretch, at the very bottom, and work my way upstream with long casts, careful mending, a focused eye on the leader and strike-indicator, with a particular interest for the deep run along the opposite bank. Half an hour later, mid-drift, the strike-indicator suddenly drags a little, as if hesitant. There’s no hesitance in my response, however. Lifting the rod resolutely I’m immediately met with the weight of something big and angry down below.

The next 5 minutes I follow the fish up and down the river on trembling feet and try my best to cushion the powerful tugs that propagate through the line and into my fly rod every time the fish thrashes about -something that it does frequently and with the greatest of vehement irritability.

A Magnificent Creature

Obviously, the fish has both the body weight and the muscles to refuse and resist, but it can’t fight the invisible pull forever. Soon, the fish materializes in the murky water along my own bank, like a ghost manifesting itself out of thin air. Unlike what I had expected, it isn’t chrome.

Quite the contrary, the fish is golden and its metallic blue flanks are painstakingly covered with inkstain-sized spots of which several are completely scarlet in color. Safely in the net, Martin and I marvel at the magnificent creature. It is 80 centimeters and weighs in excess of 6 kilos, but is it a seatrout? In addition to migratory seatrout and arctic char, Varmá is known to house a population of full-grown resident brown trout; this might very well be one of them. We shoot a series of quick images and release the fish. It will turn out to be the biggest fish of the trip, but certainly not the last. Now that our confidence has been restored, it’s game on!

Pocket Water Fishing in the Upper Reaches

As the day progresses, we venture further and further upriver –all the way to where a series of steep waterfalls mark the end of the seatrout’s migratory route. Along the way, we catch a number of feisty seatrout holding in deep runs, depressions behind big rocks and boulders, and along undercut banks. In many places, the current is now pushing fiercely and the water has turned the color of cocoa, but as long as we cast, mend, and drift our flies with precision and focus and we continue to read the water with great care, we manage to pick up a few fish here and there.

The seatrout that we catch feel well-deserved, but in a different way compared to the coastal seatrout back home. The ones back home are like diligence prizes, bestowed upon those who are stubbornly tenacious and headstrong. Varmá’s seatrout feel well-deserved because the fishing is challenging. Because persuading them into eating requires tactical and technical skills. Because full focus and concentration is needed to connect. Because not everyone can come here and catch fish after fish.

In the rain, which continues to pour relentlessly down, we hook and land several seatrout: Each of them with their own unique looks in varying degrees of pre-spawn colors, but with the same unruly temperament and explosivity.

Technical Nymph Fishing

The upper parts of the river, where small but deep holding pockets gape under gushing rapids, prove to house big seatrout. It’s extremely technical fishing, but we meticulously go about it and find ways of dead-drifting our nymphs below cascades and waterfalls and behind boulders. Once connected to a fish, we tumble up, down, and across the river in hot pursuit of the raging fish with big smiles across our faces. It’s an incredibly exciting fishery; intense and spellbinding.

Suddenly, three days have passed, and in the meantime, we’ve caught an amount of fish that would be unimaginable and utopian on the open coast. As a fanatical coastal fly fisherman, I might still have the delusional idea that seatrout fishing is mostly about searching and not catching. But I’m now ready to conclude that there’s nothing wrong with catching solid numbers of seatrout. At least not when you have to put in your best work to catch each and every one of them.

On River Varmá the struggle is real. It’s a river that rewards technical and tactical finesse over blind tenacity and power of will. And the rewards are great!

FACT FILE – River Varmá

The The Varmá River has its origins in the mountain range northwest of Hveragerdi, a small city located some 45 kilometers east of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik. Compared to a lot of other Icelandic rivers, Varmá is a relatively short river comprising a mere 15 kilometers of steep gradient and cascading water. It is a tributary to the mighty glacial river Ölfusa, whose massive icy water the Varmá briefly manages to warm before it reaches the sea west of Eyrarbakki.

The name ”Varmá” refers to the river’s warm water, which is due to thermal activity in the source area and downstream towards Hveragerdi, which is a popular tourist attraction because of the many warm springs in and around the city.

The temperatures in Varmá sometimes get to 68-77 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer months, while it typically stabilizes around 50-59 degrees F during fall and winter –something that suits both the resident and migratory fish in the river. Apart from the seatrout runs during the late summer and fall months, there are also resident brown trout and a small population of BIG arctic char in Varmá, and, as a result, it can be fished all throughout the season. The seatrout fishing peaks in August and September, and depending on the water levels it is fished with either streamers (during high water conditions) or (indicator) nymphs when the water is low and clear. During particularly low water conditions, you can experience some incredibly exciting and highly technical sight-fishing, where you spot and cast to seatrout stacked up in pocket waters on the upper parts of the river. 9’ 6-weight rods and floating WF fly lines are perfect for Varmá –perhaps supplemented with a sink-tip or a sinking poly-leader for swinging streamers.

Fishing licenses can be bought via Reykjavik Angling Club by following this link: www.svfr.is/varm. They cost from $105 to $160 depending on the season, and they provide access to the whole length of the river on a rotational beat basis. Additional information can be requested via email: svfrveidivarsla@gmail.com.

with a seatrout

Varmá River, Iceland