Crazy Big
I clicked on the link the biologist sent me from his cabin in Iceland. A column of trout swam past a counter he had set up to record the spawning fish: for the most part, huge males, with fierce kypes and red spots the size of dimes.
If you find yourself dreaming about big trout—very big trout—and you want a shot at a hook-jawed brown that’ll take you way down into your backing, then Iceland’s Lake Thingvallavatn belongs on your bucket list. It is the fly-fishing equivalent of pulling to an inside straight, coming up with a royal flush and then doing both again.
Thingvallavatn is this small country’s biggest lake. It sits on the exact spot where a widening rift between North America and Eurasia rips through the moonlike landscape, drawing the heat of Earth’s molten core to the surface. That heat powers Iceland’s towering volcanoes and smoking geysers, and accounts for the near certainty of engaging in combat with a huge trout—in wind and cold, sunlight and shadow, rain, sleet and snow. The fish are always there and almost always catchable.
This tale of trout starts way before there were people on this hunk of rock in the North Atlantic. It was a time when glaciers covered much
