We fished Greenland for more than fifteen years before we ever got into the travel business and it took more than five years, after having ventured into this business, before we finally got the break in Greenland we were looking for. First, let’s explain a little bit about the history of sportfishing in Greenland.
Every summer since the late seventies or early eighties, Danish fishermen have been fishing rivers in Greenland for sea-run arctic char. Almost every river on the world’s biggest island holds good numbers of char from late June through July and August, and anglers were catching plenty of fish: Typically, more char in a week than the amount of sea trout they could catch off the coasts or in the rivers back home – in a whole year! Greenland became known as a fishing mecca for the Danes (and their Scandinavian neighbours in Sweden and Norway) but during the nineties the interest dropped.
Back then, the infrastructure in Greenland was even less developed than today, so only a few rivers close to the smaller cities could be fished. Though fish were plentiful, these rivers were often quite small – with one or two major holding pools – or glacier fed with greenish coloured water gushing out to sea. Also, the average size of the char in these rivers was affected by years of netting done by local fishermen. With many trout anglers taking up fly fishing, and a general change in focus from catching numbers to targeting bigger fish with challenging methods, taking 15 or 20 char in the 1 – 3lb range from a glacier fed river on spinning gear just didn’t sell tickets anymore. No matter what, we had other ambitions – and we never stopped searching for undiscovered rivers that offered “the real deal”.
We always knew they were there, but in a country boasting the world’s fourth longest coastline (44.087 km.), hundreds of rivers and a mere 56.000 inhabitants, accessing most of them is nearly impossible.