Greenland, described in a recent magazine article as being an ice mass 14 times the size of Britain and a home to only 55,000 people, is one of the latest places to appear in the holiday lists. In this case, specifically for anglers. And John Bailey, writing in the English Field, tells us - hard to grasp - that the ice sheet covering the country contains 3 million cubic kilometres (repeat, kilometres), "which is the vast majority of freshwater contained in the entire universe." The short summer is, apparently, brilliant - flowers, mushrooms, mosses. You may see whales, and other large sea creatures, and on land musk oxen, ermine, lemming, arctic foxes, reindeer and others. But angling - for arctic changes is the main theme. Now, quite a few years ago a local supermarket in Dublin displayed largish steaks of what from a distance looked like salmon, but which were marked as Arctic Char. A lighter pink than salmon, a more delicate flavour, perhaps; quite an experience. Then no more. It is known that char, here since the ice age at the bottom of lakes, are now being farmed in Ireland. But these supermarket fish came from northern waters.
The writer in the Field says of those he fished in the rivers of Greenland "they are large, long, streamlined fish, burstingly strong from a diet of shrimp, krill and immature cod . .. These fish come from the world's a most unpolluted seas and somehow you can taste it in every mouthful." Virtually all rivers are netted by the Innuit people who nevertheless allow "sport fishermen", if they behave - i.e., put back all fish not needed for the evening supper. Not until late August will you need a torch at night. That's summer on Greenland. Winter conditions for visitors (in this case a film crew), we read of in the memoirs of that formidable woman Leni Riefenstahl who is chiefly known for her film Triumph of the Will which records the Nuremberg Nazi Party rally with intricate and massive formations of Blackshirts, Brownshirts and the Labour Services, etc., a triumph of presentation. She also did a film on the Berlin 1936 Olympics. Both Hitler and Goebbels, according to her memoirs, pursued her, but in vain.
Anyway, for five months on Greenland. a film unit in 1932, a long time before the fishing brochures, after pleasant summer weather, ran into autumn and winter conditions and were projected off ice-floes when they broke up. Some nearly drowned, others froze or got fevers. Wild dogs broke into their tents and ate leather boots and even Leni's sealskin trousers "my beautiful film costume." At the age of 88 she published a book of underwater, photographs taken while diving in the Red Sea and elsewhere. What next?
