The Surfers Journal
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We almost lost the door to the Land Cruiser. We’d driven for about two hours, bounced over four-wheel-drive-only lava fields, heard stories of territorial elves who live in rocks, pulled up at a black-sand beach with an offshore-plumed left-hander, and gone to open the car door—only to have the wind catch it and hurl it open so hard, the hinges creaked in pain.
“Holy shit!” said Ramón Navarro, the Chilean big-wave surfer. “It’s nearly been ripped off.”
“I’ve seen it happen before,” answered Elli Thor Magnusson, Icelandic surfer-artist and our host for this windswept romp through the land of fire and ice.
It was not your typical surf trip. First, there was Iceland itself: cold, rugged, prone to victory-at-sea conditions. Then there was the salmon. Patagonia had invited about a dozen journalists and activists to learn about the adverse environmental impacts of open-net salmon farming.
A press trip to impart caution. Surfing was the foil and the respite.
We kicked off with a meet-and-greet dinner at a café overlooking serene rolling hills dotted with plumes of steam from geothermal baths, just one of Iceland’s myriad geological wonders.
Round one corner, and there’s a spectacular glacier. Round another, and there’s a snowcapped volcano. It did fabulous things for my head. Gone was the petty internal noise. In its place: the miracle that is life on Earth. And the miracle that is planet Earth. Accompanied by questions around how not to destroy it.
“The open-net salmon farming industry is growing rapidly, across Europe and in Iceland,” Jón Kaldal, of the Icelandic Wildlife Fund, explained to our group at one of the more junket-y events. “And it’s responsible for driving wild salmon toward extinction, polluting Iceland’s pristine coasts, and mistreating the farmed animals. The wild North Atlantic salmon population is now a quarter of what it was in 1970.”
Fiftyish, with close-cropped white hair and a purposeful mien, Kaldal’s exasperation was palpable. A career journalist, he’d joined the movement against open-net salmon farming in 2017. “People think it’s a food production system, but salmon farming is literally a food reduction system,” he explained. “The amount of protein and nutrients you put into the system is less than what you get out of it.”
As the documentary film Laxaþjóð: A Salmon Nation explains, Norway is seen as a bellwether in the Nordic salmon industry, about 15 or 20 years deeper into its march toward fish farming than Iceland. Production began there in the late 1970s and took off in the ’80s. It was a small, idyllic industry built on the creed that you had to treat the animals well. It expanded into a global business. As profits grew, the creed eroded. Selective breeding and scientific research begat farmed salmon.
“The open-net pens that companies use confine a large number of animals to small, unnatural environments, which fosters the proliferation of parasites and diseases, leading to devastatingly high mortality rates among the farmed salmon,” Kaldal told us. “Last year, approximately 63 million farmed salmon died in Norwegian sea pens, and 5 million died in Icelandic pens. To put these figures into context, the estimated wild-salmon stock in Norway is around 500,000 fish, and the Icelandic wild-salmon stock is approximately 70,000 fish. During each farming cycle—between 18 to 25 months—the mortality rate is around 40 percent.”
He pulled up an image of the disease-ravaged salmon. Some were missing heads. Others had chunks of flesh missing, Night of the Living Dead–like.
“Icelandic rivers contain wild-salmon stocks that have been adjusting to their natural environment for the last 10,000 years,” Kaldal said. “They’ve adapted to their home rivers, and they’re genetically coded to survive in their natural environment. In the net pens, on the other hand, you have farmed salmon from Norway that have been selectively bred for over 50 years with one single purpose: to grow as fat and big as possible in the shortest possible time. When these fish escape the open-net pens, they swim upriver and breed with the wild salmon, effectively dumbing down the genes of the wild salmon.”
Kaldal rose from his chair.
“If the government were to close this industry now, nature is so resilient that it would heal,” he said, clenching his hand into a fist. “The wild salmon will clean out the hybrids from the farmed salmon, and it will grow strong again. But time is running out fast.”
On our first day, we convoyed in cars, vans, and a bus, breaking rule no. 1 of surf-travel etiquette by arriving en masse at a break I shall not name.
We parked in the lunar-looking dunes and checked the waves. Waist-high, light offshore wind, a few playful empty peaks. The sea was pewter gray, with large fishing vessels on the horizon.
The black-sand beach stretched for miles, human-less, post-apocalyptic but beautiful in a macabre, death-metal way.
We wormed into our thick rubber and frolicked in the velvet-smooth combers, all 20 or so of us. The water was icy but also once removed, by aid of wetsuit and numbness of body. Navarro was our sole star surfer on the trip. He zinged across small lefts as if reaching for something higher. The rest of us mostly flailed. Peeling out of my suit—needing help to peel out of my suit—I realized I’m not a cold-water surfer.
Our second day was a little better. We rose at dawn, piled into Magnusson’s blood-red 1991 Toyota Land Cruiser—Magnusson, Navarro, the English photographer Bella Rose Bunce,
JJ Huggins from Patagonia, and me—and sped through lava fields carpeted with woolly fringe-moss. It had a barren, moon-like vibe, as if a SpaceX Starship could land at any second.
“How many surfers in Iceland?” asked Navarro, riding shotgun.
“There are only about 30 to 40 year-round surfers,” said Magnusson. “I was lucky to be part of the first generation. It hasn’t grown that much.”
Blue eyes, long blond hair, Icelandic pale skin, Magnusson spoke with an even-keeled calm. Between sips of coffee, he explained that he’d started surfing around 1999. He was a snowboarder who got introduced to riding waves via his friends at the local snowboard shop.
The sky was pregnant with storm clouds. There were waves, waves everywhere, but blown to bits.
This was pre-YouTube. He rented The Endless Summer II and watched it obsessively. His obsession was commensurate with the scarcity. “There was no surf shop,” he said. “We hadn’t even started discovering the breaks.”
Magnusson and a surf buddy strapped their boards on the roof and went exploring every chance they got. Bystanders thought they were insane. “For Icelanders, the sea was never recreational—it was just for sustenance,” he explained. “We were a very poor nation, and the men would go out on these open boats, and the weather changes quickly, and they’d lose lots of males in the towns, generationally. People here fear the ocean. So, when we started surfing, people were like, ‘No, no, you can’t go in there.’”
In 1970, Surfer published a letter from a US serviceman stationed in Iceland that read, “The waves here are generally very good, and 8-foot surf is common.” In 1997, Surfer ran a feature on Iceland with Donavon Frankenreiter, Robert “Wingnut” Weaver, and Mark Renneker. “There was one wave in that article, and for 10 years we were trying to figure out where it was,” laughed Magnusson.
Through the early 2000s and beyond, he and his friends pioneered many breaks. Half the fun was the proverbial search. Not only did he ride these new waves, but he photographed them, and he soon became what he called “the go-to guy in Iceland.” “The Icelandic surf scene is a small culture made up of people from all walks of life—fishermen, pharmacists,” he explained. “We’re very tight knit. But I’ve also gotten to meet many interesting people, from Stephanie Gilmore to Andrew Kidman to Dane Gudauskas.”
I asked him what distinguishes the Iceland surfing experience.
“Iceland’s like having a super-hot but crazy lover,” he said. “You get rain, sun, and snow—sometimes all in the same session. When it’s good, it’s great. When it’s bad, it’s really bad.”
The road narrowed and hugged the rocky coastline. The sky was pregnant with storm clouds. The steel-gray sea looked, as James Joyce famously described it, “scrotumtightening.” Rain splashed the windscreen. There were waves, waves everywhere, but blown to bits, a dog’s breakfast.
We passed Grindavík, a small fishing village that’s been hammered by earthquakes and volcanoes in recent years. The dwellings were spartan. The golf course was empty. Magnusson pointed out the protective barriers, built from big boulders, to stanch the lava flow. He explained that a state of emergency had been declared in 2003, forcing an evacuation, and that there’ve been many volcanic eruptions since, thus the ghost town.
“This was the best lobster soup in Iceland,” he said, pointing to an abandoned seafood restaurant. “Now it’s gone.”
We dropped down a steep hill onto a rugged, otherworldly shoreline, the waves banging into the misty black rocks. “Looks exactly like Rapa Nui,” said Navarro.
“Iceland has the biggest stretches of untouched nature in Europe,” said Magnusson. He told us about an A-grade pointbreak in the Westfjords, where he and his partner have a house. “I was drawn there for the waves and the freediving. But now there’s a crazy amount of salmon farms. And the water used to be clear, like the Caribbean, but now it’s murky from all the farmed-fish waste.”
“My father was a fisherman,” Navarro said.
Along with his surfing career, he explained, he’s a third-generation fisherman and has been working in his native Chile to protect the waves, the traditional fishing culture, and the rich biodiversity of his home, Punta de Lobos. He was drawn to this trip as an extension of those efforts. The parallels between the two situations were obvious.
“My family is part of the ocean,” Navarro added. “In the ocean near my home, there’s no more mussels, no more abalone. They killed a culture and a tradition.”
Magnusson hung a left onto the vestiges of a dirt road, and suddenly all turned wobbly as we navigated large, bouncy boulders. He was sedate—he’d done this a thousand times before.
“Here’s where Clint Eastwood shot the Iwo Jima scene in Flags of Our Fathers,” he said, pointing at a barren field.
We bounced to near–car sickness and arrived at a left-hand pointbreak, its fat faces buffeted by blustery offshore wind.
That’s when Navarro went to open the door, and the wind grabbed it. As noted, Magnusson remained unfazed.
I stepped out of the car and into the wind, rain, and icy cold—and decided I’d sit this session out. Meanwhile, Navarro and Huggins changed into their suits amid gusts. They caught empty overhead waves. Not great on the quality scale, but one of those surfs you never forget. Navarro exhibited ace wave-whispering, finding an unlikely tube. After surfing for a couple hours, they came in shivering and “oh fuck”-ed their way out of their rubber.
Magnusson and Bunce were also shivering. Aside from the car, there was no shelter from the rain. Committed to getting photos from a variety of angles, they got soaked head to toe.
I sat and considered how the Icelandic surf experience is precisely the opposite of the Waikiki dream, exported via the likes of Duke, George Freeth, Tom Blake, Jack London, et cetera. There are no ukeleles, balmy breezes, palm trees, or papayas. Here, the matte-black, bouldery landscape meets wind-slaughtered, wet-cement water of the 41-to-57-degree variety. The muscly outrigger-canoe paddlers are replaced by cargo ships and Deadliest Catch–type fishing boats. After surfing, you don’t talk story on the sand under rainbow-sherbet skies. You shudder under sideways rain—and beeline for the hot springs.
We flew to the Eastfjords, our whole crew. It was like summer camp. We stayed in a hotel overlooking Lake Lagarfljót, which allegedly houses a Loch Ness–type monster known as Lagarfljótsormur (Lagarfljót Worm). At the amazing Vök Baths, we moved from hot water to icy lake, all the while on the lookout for the mythical creature. These things seemed linked somehow: believing that someone could make a difference in the local campaign against open-net salmon farming and believing in the Lagarfljót Worm.
The next morning, we packed into a bus and followed a winding road high into the snowy mountains, then dropped vertiginously down into Seyðisfjörður, a quaint village sandwiched between mountain and fjord. At a small café, we had coffee and heard from Benedikta Svavarsdóttir, head of the nonprofit Vatnavinafélagið (VÁ). She informed us of the proposed open-net salmon farm in the shimmering fjord just outside the window. “The municipality wants it, but 75 percent of the residents don’t,” she said.
Kaldal chimed in: “Salmon farming in open-net pens is terrible for the environment, both in the fjords and for the wild salmon far away. It releases huge amounts of unfiltered sewage to the fjords of Iceland, of Chile, Norway, Scotland—basically, wherever they operate. It’s shit from the fish, leftover feed, a huge amount of microplastics, heavy metals, pesticides, some drugs. It’s a polluting, damaging industry.”
“Iceland failed in creating a good, sustainable future for many of its small villages,” Svavarsdóttir explained. “It’s the saddest story in Iceland right now. A huge company with a lot of wealth can come in and take our beautiful nature, harm it. They’ve already shown that they have no community responsibility. It’s important for all the communities to know that they have power within them. They have the power to say no.”
The main argument in favor of the open-net-pen salmon farming industry is built around the fact that these corporations create jobs in rural communities, as well as fill the global need for protein. On the other hand, Iceland is one of the most popular recreational fishing destinations in the world, which has helped to create an alternate industry and livelihood for those rural communities. There are approximately 2,250 fishing lodges, outfitters, and tour operators in Iceland that depend on direct income from recreational wild-salmon fishing in the rivers, which of course depends on healthy salmon populations.
“What people don’t understand,” said Svavarsdóttir, “is that every river has a certain kind of stock. Every river has its own historical salmon there that’s built in a certain way.
And the open-net pens will lead to the complete destruction of every river, every stock.
And that is why we must keep them out of our waters.”
“They’re creating a handful of jobs,” added Kaldal. “But they’re risking destroying the jobs of all those others who depend on the healthy salmon stocks. It’s a few jobs at the expense of many.”
After the talk, I spoke one-on-one with Kaldal.
“Is there a viable solution to open-net-pen farming?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Open-net-pen salmon farming has no viable solution. Like I said, this business is built on the suffering and death of the farmed animals and the polluting of the sea and the fjords. It’s a feature of this industry, not a bug.”
He took a sip of coffee and continued.
“That being said, while I am not a cheerleader for salmon farming in general, when it is conducted in land-based or closed-containment systems, the discharge of waste and the escape of fish are at least not as devastating.”
I learned in my research that the Hardangerfjord, in Norway, boasts what might be the salmon farm of the future: a tall tank that goes down 72 meters and holds 200,000 fish. This iteration of closed-pen farming solves two problems: salmon escaping and sea lice infiltrating the stock.
So why hasn’t the entire industry adopted it?
Firstly, the technology is brand new.
And secondly—a big secondly—it’s expensive. “Land-based farming and closed-containment systems in the sea are where this industry is already migrating,” Kaldal told me. “However, the fundamental problem with salmon farming overall is that it consumes significantly more protein and nutrients than it produces. To create one meal of farmed salmon, the industry requires protein and nutrients from other sources, such as wild fish and soy, that could provide at least three to four meals for humans.”
I pressed him on the counterargument that salmon farming creates jobs.
“It is important to understand that open-net salmon farming constitutes only a tiny fraction of Iceland’s job market, at around 0.2 percent,” he said. “The environmental impact, however, is immense. Seeking an alternative to simply stopping this industry is like asking for a substitute for cigarettes when advised to quit smoking. Just stop. This practice is ruining Iceland’s biodiversity, just as smoking ruins one’s health.”
The symposium was followed by lunch at a nearby restaurant. Salmon was not on the menu—Kaldal recommends a moratorium on eating Atlantic salmon, but “Pacific wild sockeye is okay.” Instead, we enjoyed baked cod, poached leeks, homemade feta, blackened shishito peppers, and fresh sourdough bread slathered in whipped Icelandic butter.
After lunch, we rounded the fjord to the less-inhabited side and, with a local guide leading us, hiked high into the green hills. There was a waterfall so compositionally perfect, it looked fake. Behind it was another waterfall. And behind that one, another, so that the frame was filled with perfect waterfalls, spilling off the perfect snowcapped mountain into the gleaming fjord.
We reached the top, and, standing at the base of another tall, frigid waterfall, I got to talking with British journalist and activist Phil Young, who has used his extensive background in action sports to become an advocate for diversity in the outdoors. Looking out over the Edenic beauty, the hiss of the waterfall as background music, he said, “Many of the kids I work with never get out of the city. And why would you want to save the environment if you don’t even know what it is?”
The surf pumped on the final day of our trip, as it often does. We were standing in line at a takeaway place in Reykjavík when Magnusson, off checking the waves, sent a video of a big, barreling slab, the right so diabolical that it seemed to eat itself, the left long, ledging, walloping, but also maybe makeable. More exciting than the wave in this short clip, though, was watching its effect upon Navarro, who was about to order a sandwich. He paced, wrung his hands, scratched at ghost itches.
Once we got out at the coast, I saw the setup was situated directly in front of a fishery that pumped out rotten-smelling fish water, attracting seagulls whose droppings splotched the lava rocks. If we were anywhere else, I’d have guessed that it would likely be a shark pit, but, according to Magnusson, shark attacks are not a concern in Iceland.
The wave itself had been discovered by a Puerto Rican bodyboarder, who was out there when we pulled up, getting tubed. So was local surfer Heidar Logi. Navarro exhibited ace navigational skills of the sort that comes from a long line of fishers. Not only did he find the barrel every time it offered itself, but he picked off all the right waves and placed himself in all the right spots. I was reminded of what Kaldal had told us about the wild salmon—how they use their keen navigational skills to find their way back to not only the river where they were spawned, but the actual riverbed.
“So fun,” said Navarro when he finally came in, abuzz. “But also so heavy.”
I wanted to experience Reykjavík—to sit in a cozy restaurant on the main drag, Laugavegur, and ponder and people-watch and eat a plate of the great Icelandic lamb that Magnusson had told me about. (“Really small farms,” he said. “The meat is crazy tender.”) I extended my trip for two days and did exactly that.
The restaurant was chockablock with tourists, a babel of at least a half-dozen different languages. The lamb was fall-off-the-bone tender, bursting with smoky flavor—home cooking of the Icelandic sort. There were many bars along Laugavegur. Most of them advertised live music. Shivering in the cold, basking in the afterglow of all that spectacular natural beauty, it was easy to see why so much exciting music has come out of Iceland.
The next morning, I paid a visit to Magnusson and his partner, Rachel Jonas, at their home in Reykjavík. Over strong coffee in their airy living room, we talked love, war, art-making, and huldufólk, which are essentially elves.
Magnusson told me that there’s not a lot of religion in Iceland, “but there’s a strong connection with nature.”
“Nature kind of is the religion,” added Jonas, who moved here from the US about 10 years ago.
On the walls were Magnusson’s photos and paintings. On the floor, a sculpture he made from fishing floats. I asked how he came to art-making.
“I was a skater when I was a kid, and with skateboarding you’re influenced by art without even knowing it,” he said.
He became interested in photography and enrolled in the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, England, spending two years there.
“I came back to Iceland and worked as a photographer, shooting surfing and doing commercial work,” he said. “Then I realized I wanted to make stuff that means a lot to me. I wanted physical things.” He nodded at the sculpture. “Often, remote beaches in Iceland are full of these brightly colored floats and plastic things.”
He showed me photos from his 2023 exhibition Boltaland. For two years, he collected buoys and nets he found washed up on the beach. He lined them up in rows on the sand, made stripes, suspended them above the ocean—they looked vilely artificial amid the rugged natural surroundings—and made photos of the arrangements. “So much plastic in the fishing industry,” said Magnusson. “And you wonder: When is it going to show up in the fish? When is it going to show up in us?”
“The buoys remind me of those colored ball pits that kids play in,” I said.
“I wanted it to be fun and playful,” said Magnusson, “but also to send a message.”
I told him that, as a North American writing a piece about Icelandic surfing, I wanted to be sensitive to the locals and not contribute to blowing up their spots.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s easy to watch a video or see an article and think that’s the norm, but those good days are far and few between.
If you don’t live here, it’s very hard to get them. It’s less than average most of the time. And we do a lot of driving.”
As we were saying our goodbyes, Magnusson gave me a book of his photographs.
On the cover was a muted black-and-white shot of heavily rubbered longboarders making their way across a black-sand beach, the words “cold ground” scratched above them.
“Nice title,” I said.
“A band I’m in used to cover the Tom Waits song,” he told me.
There’s the notion that surfers are inherently environmentally conscious by virtue of the fact that we frolic in oceans, and between waves we straddle our boards and ponder the horizon. When you’re in that dream, and a plastic bag floats past, the juxtaposition can be particularly jarring. I found myself wondering: Does that move us to take action?
My flight out of Reykjavík departed at 7 a.m., which meant waking at four. In the back of the car on the way to the airport, I listened to “Cold Cold Ground” while looking out at the cold, cold lava fields and the icy, icy wet-cement sea. We passed the US Army base where, Magnusson had told me, possibly the first person to surf in Iceland had been stationed, though he couldn’t say for sure, and his humble uncertainty seemed unto itself magical.
I thought of Navarro ducking behind the curtain of one of those shimmering slab waves. I thought of the waterfalls, the perfect order of snowcapped mountain to fjord to sea. I remembered what Young had said as we stood together at the foot of the falls: “Why would you want to save the environment if you don’t even know what it is?” I boarded the plane with a lot to process and more questions to ask, which was perhaps the point of the conversations I’d heard—and the things I’d seen—during that week in Iceland.
The sky was pregnant with storm clouds. There were waves, waves everywhere, but blown to bits.
[Feature image by Bella Rose Bunce]
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