I've just returned from four days in Iceland where I went salmon fishing with a group of friends. Arriving at the airport we were told to our astonishment that our entire fishing gear would have to be disinfected - rods, reels, boots and even lures and flies. We had heard something about this practice, but someone in our party had got hold of the idea that it only applied to landing nets, which we thought we were very smart to have left behind. As it was, our entire kit was laid in a long trough that had almost certainly been originally designed as a urinal. It was sprayed with disinfectant and left to marinade in it for a full 10 minutes, before being rinsed, dried and returned.
The whole process only took 20 minutes, but we all felt it was rather humiliating, as if we had been declared 'unclean fishermen'. In a sense, of course, we had. Iceland cares passionately about fish. No less than 65 per cent of the country's GDP comes from fishing. All its coins pay tribute to the importance of this natural resource. Where the rest of the world puts the heads of its political or cultural heroes, or sovereigns or dictators, Iceland puts fish. Cod on the one krona coin, hake on the 10, lumpfish on 100. And very beautiful coins they are too. I gave a bunch to my son, and they earned his deep respect. 'I know why they put fish on the money,' he said to me a few days later. 'Why?' I asked. 'Because you have to pay money to buy fish.' 'Exactly right,' I said.
In fact the cod is a kind of national hero. One of the few twentieth-century wars to produce an unambiguous, non-Pyrrhic victor was the Icelandic cod war. They won. We, and the rest of the EU countries, lost. They got exclusive fishing rights to a 200-mile zone around their coast. We got the common fisheries policy, and a quota system so profoundly daft that we end up legally obliged to throw millions of pounds worth of edible dead fish back into the sea.
No wonder that, faced with the choice between a share of the subsidies, security and trade protectionism of EU membership, and the right to control their own economic destiny almost exclusively through fishing, for the Icelanders there was simply no contest. There still isn't. They enjoy one of the highest standards of living of any country in the world. No matter that a beer costs a fiver a time. Every Icelander I met was always ready to buy a round.
If the disinfecting experience at the airport left a sour taste in my mouth it was soon washed away as I found myself thigh deep in the river Ranga whose icy waters, rippled blue-black like a mackerel's back, slid inexorably through the volcanic tundra. It wasn't long before I caught a salmon - a fat fresh hen fish of about seven kilos, in such rude health that it took me the best part of half an hour to get it to the bank. We didn't kill it. It went into the 'fish bank' - a cage in the river where the best hens are kept for breeding at the end of the season.
It rained hard that night, and all through the next day. As the river rapidly went into full spate, the ice blue turned chocolate brown and became unfishable. In the course of that rainy afternoon we sat in the lodge drinking beer and sipping Schnapps, and our guide Skuli explained how the Icelanders manage their salmon fisheries. One of the problems with the Ranga is that many of the natural spawning grounds have been destroyed - not by pollution, but by volcanic activity. The 'wild' fish stocks now originate almost entirely from man-made fish nurseries in the upper reaches of the rivers. They release the par from the nurseries on just such days as the one we were experiencing - so the coloured waters give the fish maximum cover from predators as they head down to the sea.
We inevitably got around to the subject of salmon farming - and we all had the usual moan about how an industry, one of whose principal justifications should be that it takes the pressure off wild salmon, could be so greedy, unscrupulous and environmentally reckless that it has actually come close to destroying its natural progenitor. How did Iceland, which itself has a substantial salmon-farming industry, cope with these inevitable tensions, we wondered. The surprising answer was that there barely are any tensions. The brilliantly simple policy that allows the two activities to co-exist is that the one is not allowed to happen anywhere near the other - salmon farming is restricted to areas of the coast with a negligible wild salmon run. 'Nobody anywhere has been able to successfully mix the two on the same sites,' explained Skuli, 'so we don't even try.'
The procedure at the airport began to make sense. There may have been no real reason to fear that our fishing tackle carried diseases. But given the mess we are making of our own fisheries we could hardly blame our hosts for not taking any chances.
As I left the country, my tackle restored to a state of grace by Iceland's pristine water and thriving wild salmon, I wished I could reverse the direction of that disinfecting ritual. I wanted to take some of the good sense of Iceland's long-sighted fishy vision and cast it back into our own myopically murky waters.
Deep-fried salmon skin
If you catch or, God forbid, pay for, a fresh, wild salmon, you'll want to make the best possible use of every last morsel of it. This Japanese recipe turns the skin into something divinely crispy and sophisticated.
1 or 2 sides of descaled salmon skin, cut into 4-5 cm squares
2 tbs well-seasoned plain flour
oil for deep frying for the dipping sauce:
2 tbs soy sauce
1 tbs rice wine vinegar
1 spring onion, finely slived
1/2 thumb-sized nugget peeled ginger root, sliced
1/4 clove of garlic, very finely chopped
1/4 small red chilli, finely sliced
pinch sugar
Mix together the ingredients for the dipping sauce. Heat the oil in large pan so that a small cube of bread will turn golden brown in about a minute. Toss the squares of salmon skin in the seasoned flour, and deep fry in small batches, for around one minute, turning occasionally. When puffed up and crispy, remove and drain on kitchen paper. Serve on a large plate or tray, around the dipping sauce.
