A day on the North Atlantic: Fishing in Iceland after economic collapse

The fishing boat’s spotlight lit the early morning darkness of the pier, forcing me to squint as I flung my backpack over the cold and slippery steel rail and climbed over, following the captain. My stomach fluttered with excitement as I ducked into the cockpit through the watertight door.

Fishing has supported the Icelandic economy for centuries and remains one of few bright spots in the collapsed Icelandic economy, largely unaffected by the mass layoffs that hit most industries in the tiny country.

Fish and fish products make up about half of the country’s exports, and the industry employs between 5 percent and 10 percent of the tiny country’s workforce. The government has regulated the industry in a way that keeps the industry profitable and protects Iceland’s most important natural resource from overfishing, making Iceland a world leader in sustainable fisheries.

Recently, news stories about Iceland, especially the fishing industry, have been plentiful. I wanted to get out there and do what few journalists to date have been able to do – see it for myself.

So there I stood, wrapped in a giant yellow foul weather jacket, preparing myself to spend a day observing the industry firsthand and trying not to get the cockpit carpet too wet with my boots as the captain took his place at the helm of the Adalbjorg, a thrumming 70-foot vessel. We hadn’t even begun to move away from Sandgerdi harbor, a small port on the southwest tip of Iceland, but I couldn’t keep myself from smiling.

My first impression of the captain, Sigtryggur Albertsson, who preferred to be called Siddi, was that he seemed so young for a captain. Blond-haired, blue-eyed and sturdy, he didn’t look the way I had imagined the captain of a fishing vessel. He looked more like something out of an advertisement for Icelandic yogurt or milk or something equally wholesome.

In search of cod, haddock and plaice

When we’d come into the cockpit, David Einarsson, a short and stocky dark-haired man with a shy smile, jumped out of a rotating chair on the port side so he could cast off the lines holding the vessel and the captain could back us away from the pier. I sat in David’s chair and watched the other boats in the harbor grow smaller as we set out in search of cod, haddock and plaice.

There was no going back now. Seasick or not, I was along for the ride until we docked again that night.

I hadn’t known for sure until that morning we would even be going out. Fishing captains frequently cancelled trips because of stormy weather this spring. The week before, boats failed to go out because of severe snowstorms.

My hands shook slightly with a mix of adrenaline and nausea from my 3 a.m. wakeup and hour’s drive to the harbor. As soon as David returned to bed, the captain switched off the spotlight without warning, plunging us into sudden blackness.

Pinpricks of light from the instruments lit his hands. Outside, tiny red and green lights, which I supposed were channel marker buoys, bobbed maniacally outside in the choppy water, their movement echoing our own more-controlled pitching. I asked few questions as the captain swallowed his coffee and alternately smoked Marlboro Reds and sucked a piece of what smelled like Fisherman’s Friend – a type of mint so strong they make Altoids look like starlight mints.

Trips to the head

With more than an hour until we reached the place where he wanted to set the nets, he suggested I get some sleep. I had already run down to the head twice to vomit by the time he made this suggestion, and the acrid smell of his Marlboros was making me consider a third trip. Being inside with no fresh air and no ability to see the horizon, I readily agreed, descending with weak knees to Siddi’s cabin, one wall of which fluttered with a heavy layer of bright crayon drawings of his family, boats and fish.

Before receiving permission to spend a day on Siddi’s boat, I’d had to pass muster with Sigurder Sverrisson, head of corporate communications of the Federation of Icelandic Fishing Vessel Owners. He had walked into his office and looked me up and down appraisingly as though I hadn’t been what he expected and I didn’t quite measure up. “You look fragile,” he had said, frowning.

At the time, I had laughed. I crewed as first mate on a professional charter sailboat, and I’d sailed since 12, teaching since 15. People, especially men, frequently doubted the strength of a slight, feminine girl, and I took perverse pleasure in proving their misconceptions wrong.

I may not have felt fragile at the time, but after only half an hour of the boat’s bucking in the famously rough North Atlantic in the dark, I began to feel as though, perhaps, Sverrisson had been right. Siddi told me other journalists who had accompanied him had spent the entire day vomiting and sleeping in his cabin. I clenched my jaw when he told me this. I would be different.

I woke up, not even remembering falling asleep, when I felt the boat shift into neutral and then reverse, quickly followed by neutral again. We were, effectively, stopped. The boat didn’t rock as violently, and I heard the groan of machinery and the rhythmic clanking of chains above. As soon as I sat up, I began to feel queasy again. Taking deep breaths, I climbed into the wheelhouse. What was the point of being out if I stayed in the cabin all day?

Net unwinds to 7,200 feet

Siddi asked how I was and told me that the other four men were hauling skarkoli, “the flat fish,” which I later found out was called plaice.

On a computer screen, he monitored the position of the boat’s Danish seine net, a conical net with two long wings. When the two sides come together, he informed me, they reel the net in. The net unwound from a spool at the stern of the vessel and opened with 1,200 fathoms (about 7,200 feet) of medium diameter line unwound from two giant spools amidships.

“The flat fish, he cannot swim over, so he go into the net,” Siddi had told me distractedly as the line flew past the wheelhouse portholes, winding onto the spools. The net came aboard after all 1,200 fathoms of the line had been rewound, the floats pulled in and the empty part of the net wound onto a rotating bar in the stern.

Finally, Siddi used a portable panel of buttons to shift the boat’s hydraulic boom out over the starboard side of the vessel. He dragged the fish into a large stainless steel bin at the center of the boat, under which was the fish hold.

The shining silver fish came aboard in three batches, struggling vainly to flop back into the water. After each batch the net dropped back into the water so the fish in the back of the net could swim to the front of the net.

Once the fish were aboard, gasping and swishing their tails feebly in their pen, the four deck men, all wearing fluorescent yellow rubber suits, rubber boots, gloves and helmets, opened ports at the bottom of the bin to let some fish fall into the trough surrounding the bin.

Then the entrails flew. Knives were deftly hooked into the gills of the skarkoli and long strands of entrails came out to be tossed unceremoniously onto the deck, where they soon washed overboard to the delight of the hundreds of seagulls swarming the water around us. The partially gutted fish were thrown over shoulders into their proper baskets and bins with very little conversation between the men.

Mechanized fishing

Their work seemed to flow easily – it seemed like something even I could do. The work wasn’t as dramatic as I’d pictured. The pace was steady and the process mostly mechanized.

Erike Thorleifsson, a gentle-looking, gray-haired man with smiling eyes who told me he’d been fishing for 50 years, came into the cockpit to record the catch—so far 3 tons—on a piece of paper covered in inch-square boxes divided diagonally. In each box he wrote a number, tallying the different types of fish the men had caught. Erike matched the numbers against the amount of quota owned by the fishing company.

Icelandic fishing vessels participate in an Individual Transferrable Quota system known as ITQ. Every company or individual who wishes to fish for commercial purposes must purchase quota for every fish they catch. The Icelandic Ministry of Fisheries consults with the Marine Research Institute to determine the number of fish that can be extracted from the ocean without negatively affecting that fish species.

Quotas preserve fish stocks

“When you have this permanent number of fish you can harvest. . . . You become much more interested in preserving the fish stocks” and keeping the quota high, said Ragnar Arnason, an economics professor who specializes in fisheries management at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik.

Quota can be bought, sold, traded and used as collateral. As the stocks of fish fluctuate, so too does the amount of quota. When the government implemented the ITQ in the 1970s, fishing quota became a commodity, Arnason said, the industry became profitable for the first time, and efficient management of stocks put an end to the overfishing that came as a result of competition between boats.

Sverrisson, the head of the Federation of Icelandic Fishing Vessel Owners, said the system is not perfect—but he has yet to hear of a better solution. “If you go 20 years back, 1985, let’s say 1975, to be more precise, we had a struggling industry. There was overfishing. Everybody knew that,” he said. “Not only did we fight cod wars to fend off the Germans and the British fishing in our waters, we fought bitter battles with them, with the smaller boats against their frigates and stuff.”

Global climate change causing fish to move territories

But what happens when the fish stocks move because of changing water temperatures due to global climate change and that commodity suddenly drops to nothing?

“We will just be a little poorer,” Arnason said. “If it gets bad, people will just immigrate to Scandinavian countries, England and Scotland,” to find work. If one species were to move away from Iceland, another would probably come to take its place, he said assuredly.

The fishermen I spent the day with, though, were not nearly so sanguine about their livelihood as the academics.

“I think it’s good in some ways, bad in another way,” Siddi had said when I asked him about the quota system. “You can’t fish as much as you like… It’s all under control.” The captain and deckhands split 27.5 percent of the profits of the catch.

Around 1 p.m., after the third or fourth haul of the net, Siddi announced we would be moving to a new spot to try for cod. In the meantime, we would have lunch. My stomach had settled enough that when Siddi came up the companionway steps with a plate of flaky white fish, tiny white-fleshed potatoes, a slice of buttered rye bread and a Coca-Cola Light, my stomach instantly growled.

I made my way down the companionway steps and down a second ladder to the galley below decks. The men were all seated on benches built into the hull around an oval table, and seemed impressed that I was going to join them for lunch after my morning spent hunched over the head. They’d never seen someone throw up so cheerfully, Erike told me later.

David passed me a plate and nodded to a wild-haired man, Peter Olafsson, to make room for me. The fish turned out to be cod we had caught that morning prepared by Albert Sigtryggursson, Siddi’s father, a tall man with a bushy mustache and quiet demeanor. The men had been fishing together for many years, they’d told me, and they ate, for the most part, in companionable silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed Peter mashing his potatoes and cod together with the butter. I did the same. Delicious. Maybe it was the freshness of the fish and maybe it was the fact that there was nothing in my stomach, but I couldn’t remember ever eating such a satisfying meal.

Pippi Longstocking on the North Atlantic

When I climbed back into the cockpit, Siddi was whistling a familiar song. He’d gotten through three rounds when I finally figured out the tune. “Pippi Longstocking?” I asked.

 “Ya, Pippi!” he said, smiling. His youngest daughter, 8, loved Pippi Longstocking, I found out – she even had a Pippi costume. He spent weekends, bad-weather weeks and off weeks home with his children and his wife, whose parents own the boat he captains, but anyone could see he missed them when he was at sea. “Since I was a child I was always going to be a sailor,” he said.

The men set and hauled the nets just two or three more times after lunch. We moved around to different spots, trying to catch more fish. As we were travelling back into port soon after sunset, Erike came into the cockpit one last time to record the final catch. We finished the day with about 10 or 11 tons to sell to be filleted and resold.

As we pulled into the dock, the men donned their yellow gear one last time to offload the fish from the hold and take on more boxes and ice for the next day. They worked with the steady efficiency of a well-practiced crew used to doing the same thing five days a week. Each man had his job, and he fulfilled it without having to ask any questions or make any orders.

Eleven tons of fish

In less than an hour 11 tons of fish had been offloaded. To give some perspective, 11 tons of cod would be worth about $30,000.

Today, Erike said, they had pulled in the largest catch in a week and filled the fish hold in good time. “Did you like it?” he’d asked.

I said I had, very much, giving him my best smile. It was true.

The Icelandic fishing industry, as far as I could see, didn’t have much to worry about. The system worked well from both practical and academic standpoints. And I found myself surprisingly loathe to leave the boat and the men, whose kind smiles and polite inquiries I’d come to enjoy.

“You’re not going home,” he said, patting me on the shoulder amicably. “They think you’re lucky.”