Salmon fishing in the river Vefsna
in Norway.
By Kjell M. Øksendal, 24.4.2003

Salmon was always something of a staple diet for the people of the Vefsn Valley. Traditionally salmon fishing was a way of procuring food and was not, therefore, viewed as a sport. The very abundance of salmon made fishing an effortless task and this in itself discouraged the growth of angling as a sport. The fish were caught with baited hook, with salmon nets, with sweep nets, or simply by snatching them from under the waterfalls, where there were salmon in plenty.

Salmon, therefore, was not considered to be a delicacy. Indeed the farm labourers who lived-in on the surrounding farms had a clause written into their contracts which explicitly stated that salmon should not be served at meal times more than three times a week. During the fishing season (from about the 1st of June until the beginning of October) salmon would be served boiled or fried at dinner times and smoked at other meals. Much of the fish caught was salted in barrels. li would then be served boiled or smoked during the long winter months.

Fishing as a sport was introduced to the Vefsn Valley by English anglers, who began fishing the river about the middle of the nineteenth century. It was they who introduced the method of baiting the hook with prawns and the techniques of using the fly and the spoon.

Few of the farms along the Vefsn Valley own fishing rights in the river. Most of the land was originally owned by the Brodtkorb family, and when their Vefsn estates were parcelled out in small farms in the years after 1660 they retained control of the waterfalls and the fishing rights. Today the fishing rights and the fall rights are owned partly by the Norwegian Water and Electricity Board (Norges Vassdrags- og Elektrisitetsvesen, NVE) and partly by the Brodtkorb heirs.

Originally only the lower part of the Vefsna as far as Laksfors was a salmon river. There the waterfall prevented salmon reaching further up-river. At the end of the last century, however, salmon ladders were constructed, thus enabling the fish to penetrate further upstream. The number of salmon ladders at falls along the Vefsna has steadily increased and several of its tributaries have in this way become good salmon fishing streams.

The number of salmon caught at Forsjord varied from 350 to 400 in a normal season, to 600 in the record year of 1921. Only salmon weighing more than 8 lbs were counted. In 1921 an English businessmann, colonel Cotton, and his hooker, Karl Forsjord, beat the record for the number of salmon caught in any 24-hour period. Between 10 a.m. and 8 a.m. the following morning they caught 32 salmons.

The greatest authority on salmon fishing i the Vefsna was Johan Erlandsen. As a young man he spent many years at sea and, during this time learnt to speak fluent English. When he returned to his native valley in 1905 he acted as the intermediary between the local people, the Norwegian authorities and English anglers. He filled this position for nearby 60 years. He died in 1971 at the age of 90.

In recent years the angling in the Vefsna river has been object to democratisation; now, during the annual season, anyone porter of an angling card, may have access to the famous eddies in Vefsna, formerly strictly reserved for English lords and gentlemen.

The chances of getting big salmon catches by angling in Vefsna has however decreased in the last decades due to the introduction of the pest, Gyrodactylus Salaris. The lack of salmon has only to some extent been compensated by rich autumnal catches of sea-trout.