Jökla - “Genesis” in a Salmon River

The Jökla is an extraordinary river and what my good friend Throstur has achieved there and continues to achieve during a period of global decline in Atlantic salmon is nothing short of remarkable. But having known him since the early 1990s, it’s hardly surprising. When it comes to understanding salmon, restoring them, and reading a river system like scripture, he stands alone.

A River With Two Souls

The Jökla is glacier‑fed and one of the very few North Atlantic rivers that has bucked the trend over the past forty years. It feels almost like two rivers stitched together.

The upper section is wide and gentle, with flat gravel pools and easy wading. The middle section is the most scenic of all, the river tightening into a canyon, every pool quick to reach and a joy to fish. Then the river opens out again in the lower section, broad and calm, with gravel pools that are effortless to fish and rarely demand much wading.

Eight anglers share over sixty kilometres of this main stretch, supported by a superb lodge and full guiding. A further six rods fish the upper forty kilometres on a B&B basis. As with many Icelandic rivers, rod‑sharing is encouraged, not just to soften costs, but because two six‑hour sessions a day can be hard graft. Share a rod, share a room, share the rhythm of the river.

How Jökla Became What It Is

The rebirth of the Jökla began with two things:

a dam, and a man who understands salmon better than anyone I’ve met.

Before the dam was built in 2006, the river was an unfishable torrent, roaring at 500 cubic metres per second. After the dam, flows settled into a manageable 15–50 cubic metres per second, revealing a river that had always been there, hidden beneath the chaos.

Throstur’s stocking programme began immediately. It wasn’t a scatter‑gun effort; it was a long‑term, carefully measured plan. By the mid‑2010s, the river began to show signs of a self‑sustaining population. By the early 2020s, that population had taken firm root.

Today, nine to ten thousand salmon return annually, and crucially, none of the fish in the main river come from ranched smolts. They are wild, the progeny of the original stocking programme started in 2007. Throstur now supplements this by placing fry and parr into small upper tributaries, not to “boost numbers” but to deepen his understanding of how this evolving system behaves.

This is why I call Jökla Genesis, a river reborn, a salmon population created from almost nothing, now thriving naturally and offering anglers a glimpse of what salmon fishing used to be.

A Remote River With Old‑World Magic

Jökla is not easy to reach, ten hours by car and an hour by plane from Reykjavík. But that remoteness is part of its magic. I wrote years ago that the more remote the river, the better the salmon fishing. The Victorians understood this instinctively; it took them a day or more to reach the Scottish Highlands from London, and they considered it time well spent.

A Contrast With Scotland

Unlike Scotland, where traditional countryside pursuits are increasingly tangled in rewilding schemes, greenwashing, grant‑grabbing, and the creation of jobs for undergraduates who’ve never set foot in a river Jokla’s story is refreshingly simple.

It is driven by landowners working together, taking a holistic, long‑term approach, practising good husbandry, and sharing a single aim:

To create a sustainable, wild‑as‑possible, commercially viable salmon fishery, funded not by public money, but by visiting anglers.

And they’ve done it.

The Result

In the twenty years since the dam was built, Jökla has gone from a raging torrent to one of the most successful salmon rivers in the North Atlantic. The salmon have returned in ever‑increasing numbers. Anglers have followed. The fishery has strengthened year on year.

It is proof, living, swimming proof, of what can be achieved when everyone involved shares the same vision and works toward the same goal.

Jökla is not just a river.

It is a blueprint.

A beginning.

A Genesis.