Fishing in Greenland is like, well, shooting fish in a barrel.
I grew up spending my Christmas holidays in Australia, on the beach with my family, getting sunburnt, building and destroying sand castles, filling buckets with soldier crabs. Fishing was an integral part of those holidays. It was a serious business, overseen by the menfolk. I recall starting at dawn to catch beach worms for bait, storing them in cool, dry sand. The worms would meet their fate later, on our long fishing trips. Hours would pass, patiently standing knee deep in the clear tidal river water, hand lines cast into the channel. Or bobbing in the anchored boat, water slapping the metal sides, sleepy in the sun, waiting.
Fishing in Greenland is different. First, no bait is required. Second, there is no waiting. As a rule, if you wait more than a couple of minutes, move – you’re in the wrong place. The right places aren’t difficult to pick. Around Nuuk, a good bet is a steep rock wall where stream water is flowing into the fjord. You’re almost guaranteed of catching cod.
For example, Faroese friends chose one such spot to catch some fish for drying and keeping over the winter. In an hour and a half, on two lines, they caught 89 fish. That’s an average of one per minute. It took them 8 hours to clean them all. Here’s another example. After a trip into the fjord for an afternoon, my husband suggested we stop to catch a few fish before sailing back to Nuuk, as we had freezer space for two or three. He stopped the boat, threw a line over the side, and immediately pulled in three large cod. We restarted the engine and headed home. Start to finish we were fishing for two minutes.
The challenge is not to catch fish, but to catch the fish you want. Red fish are prized over cod for their flavour, but are deeper dwelling, lingering below 100 metres, often close to 200. To catch red fish, the trick is to avoid the layer of cod waiting at shallower depths. You need a heavy sinker to send your line plunging through the cod before they have a chance to bite. Seriously.
In the summer, the rivers can also be full of Arctic char and salmon. When the fish are running, some Greenlanders wade into the cold streams and catch them with their bare hands. A friend told me of her experience hand-fishing with a Faroese guy. As he stepped on a loose rock in the shallows, it flipped up and launched an unsuspecting fish clear of the water and onto the bank. But perhaps, in the face of Faroese foe, the salmon simply surrendered.
