For seven generations, Andrea Ósk Hermóðsdóttir’s family have been fishing on the Laxá River in Aðaldalur. Iceland has a reputation as a world leader on feminism, but until recently women have not been able to work as guides to wild salmon fishing for visiting anglers – a job that has traditionally been the preserve of men.
The 21-year-old engineering student, her sister Alexandra Ósk, 16, and their friends Arndís Inga Árnadóttir, 18, and her sister Áslaug Anna, 15, are now the first generation of female guides on their river in northern Iceland, and among the very first female fishing guides in the country.
But after thousands of salmon escaped from an offshore fish farm in 2023, threatening the wild salmon population of multiple rivers, Andrea fears the job and the livelihood she has grown up with may not exist to pass on to her own children.
“To think this is something I might not be able to do my whole life is really not fun at all,” she said. “It’s really heartbreaking, not only for us but for nature itself.”
The four young women are the subjects of an upcoming documentary, Strengur (or Tight Lines), directed by Gagga Jónsdóttir. The film, shot in part during the salmon escape, explores the young women’s relationships with one another, their fathers, fishing and its future.
Salmon that escape from farms threaten wild salmon in multiple ways. They can carry disease and parasites, especially sea lice, and when interbreeding occurs, the offspring mature faster and younger, undermining the ability of the species to reproduce in nature.
The women continue to catch sea-farmed salmon that have almost certainly bred with the wild Atlantic salmon. That open-pen sea farms have not been banned is staggering to Andrea. “I really don’t understand how the Icelandic government is not doing more about this – and also how are we not learning from Norway?” she said.
Last year 33 rivers were closed to fishers in Norway after a collapse in the wild salmon population. “A lot of Norwegian rivers have been ruined by farmed salmon. How can we have that evidence and still not do anything about this?” Andrea said.
“If this goes unchanged for more time the Atlantic wild salmon will go extinct. It’s not if, it’s when,” Andrea said.
Consumers, she said, should not eat sea-farmed salmon; the only farmed salmon she ate was farmed in tanks on land.
“I hope to do this [guiding] as long as I live and also pass this down to my children as my dad has,” she said. “I’m hoping something will change. There are a lot of people in Iceland fighting for change, so hopefully it will pay off.”
Despite fishing being very male-dominated, Andrea has grown up around the sport. She learned to cast a flyfishing rod and fish salmon when she was eight years old. Her first fishing memory is her father catching a big salmon. “He had someone drive me down to the river so I could watch him fight the salmon,” she said.
Andrea attributes the lack of women in the business to household gender roles of the past, when women ran the home and men were out on the farm. But she hopes the film, which comes out in spring, will encourage more women to try fishing. “The peace I feel standing by the river and casting, it’s just something about it that’s deep in my roots,” she said.
Gagga, whose previous work includes the 2021 film Stitch ’n’ Bitch, which she directed, and Agnes Joy, which she co-wrote and produced, said she was initially drawn by the story of the young women rather than the subject of salmon fishing. But during the course of filming, when she witnessed first-hand the devastating impact of the salmon farm escape, she also became heavily invested in the fate of wild salmon.
“I didn’t go in there raging politically,” she said, but what she witnessed during filming activated her. “It is sad. What are [the young women] going to do? Work in a sea pen factory? It’s also all this knowledge of our environment, that is something we are losing and that is a bad thing for all of us.”
Open sea pens should be banned, Gagga said. “It’s not just a question about Iceland, it’s a question about the species, the Atlantic salmon, it’s for the whole world.”
But she found hope in the boundary-breaking actions of the female guides. “They say the world is changing and the systems of the men are falling apart, and I could feel it when I was making the film.”
