For seven generations, Andrea Ósk Hermóðsdóttir’s household have been fishing on the Laxá River in Aðaldalur. Iceland has a repute as a world chief on feminism, however till not too long ago girls haven’t been in a position to work as guides to wild salmon fishing for visiting anglers – a job that has historically been the protect of males.
The 21-year-old engineering pupil, her sister Alexandra Ósk, 16, and their associates Arndís Inga Árnadóttir, 18, and her sister Áslaug Anna, 15, are actually the primary technology of feminine guides on their river in northern Iceland, and among the many very first feminine fishing guides within the nation.
However after hundreds of salmon escaped from an offshore fish farm in 2023, threatening the wild salmon inhabitants of a number of rivers, Andrea fears the job and the livelihood she has grown up with could not exist to move on to her personal kids.
“To suppose that is one thing I may not be capable to do my entire life is absolutely not enjoyable in any respect,” she mentioned. “It’s actually heartbreaking, not just for us however for nature itself.”
The 4 younger girls are the themes of an upcoming documentary, Strengur (or Tight Traces), directed by Gagga Jónsdóttir. The movie, shot partly through the salmon escape, explores the younger girls’s relationships with each other, their fathers, fishing and its future.
Salmon that escape from farms threaten wild salmon in a number of methods. They’ll carry illness and parasites, particularly sea lice, and when interbreeding happens, the offspring mature quicker and youthful, undermining the flexibility of the species to breed in nature.
The ladies proceed to catch sea-farmed salmon which have nearly definitely bred with the wild Atlantic salmon. That open-pen sea farms haven’t been banned is staggering to Andrea. “I actually don’t perceive how the Icelandic authorities isn’t doing extra about this – and likewise how are we not studying from Norway?” she mentioned.
Final yr 33 rivers had been closed to fishers in Norway after a collapse within the wild salmon inhabitants. “Plenty of Norwegian rivers have been ruined by farmed salmon. How can now we have that proof and nonetheless not do something about this?” Andrea mentioned.
“If this goes unchanged for extra time the Atlantic wild salmon will go extinct. It’s not if, it’s when,” Andrea mentioned.
Customers, she mentioned, mustn’t eat sea-farmed salmon; the one farmed salmon she ate was farmed in tanks on land.
“I hope to do that [guiding] so long as I reside and likewise move this right down to my kids as my dad has,” she mentioned. “I’m hoping one thing will change. There are lots of people in Iceland preventing for change, so hopefully it’s going to repay.”
Regardless of fishing being very male-dominated, Andrea has grown up across the sport. She realized to forged a flyfishing rod and fish salmon when she was eight years outdated. Her first fishing reminiscence is her father catching a giant salmon. “He had somebody drive me right down to the river so I might watch him combat the salmon,” she mentioned.
Andrea attributes the dearth of girls within the enterprise to family gender roles of the previous, when girls ran the house and males had been out on the farm. However she hopes the movie, which comes out in spring, will encourage extra girls to strive fishing. “The peace I really feel standing by the river and casting, it’s simply one thing about it that’s deep in my roots,” she mentioned.
Gagga, whose earlier work consists of the 2021 movie Sew ’n’ Bitch, which she directed, and Agnes Pleasure, which she co-wrote and produced, mentioned she was initially drawn by the story of the younger girls reasonably than the topic of salmon fishing. However through the course of filming, when she witnessed first-hand the devastating influence of the salmon farm escape, she additionally turned closely invested within the destiny of untamed salmon.
“I didn’t go in there raging politically,” she mentioned, however what she witnessed throughout filming activated her. “It’s unhappy. What are [the young women] going to do? Work in a sea pen manufacturing facility? It’s additionally all this information of our surroundings, that’s one thing we’re shedding and that may be a unhealthy factor for all of us.”
Open sea pens ought to be banned, Gagga mentioned. “It’s not only a query about Iceland, it’s a query concerning the species, the Atlantic salmon, it’s for the entire world.”
However she discovered hope within the boundary-breaking actions of the feminine guides. “They are saying the world is altering and the techniques of the boys are falling aside, and I might really feel it once I was making the movie.”
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