Few prima donnas look fantastic in chest waders. Ankle boots maybe. Wellingtons at a pinch. But full-length neoprene from top to toe? I think not. Rumour has it, they once managed to get Jessye Norman into a wetsuit to play an under-the-Rhine maiden for an avant-garde version of one of Wagner’s Ring operas, but it took three stage hands to zip her up, and they had to clear the front row in case of ‘wardrobe malfunction’. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, on the other hand, looks neat and trim and as comfortable in her fishing clothes as if she has just popped out in Gucci slacks. She cuts a dash, and I am pretty sure she is the only famous opera singer fishing the West Rangá River in Iceland today (unless that was Nellie Melba I spotted later that evening, with a deerstalker over her eyes, down on Beat 3).
It is a grey, quilted Icelandic summer afternoon, ideal for fishing – less good for sun bathing - when we step into the water and wade out over a shifting river bed. The fish have been mocking the great Dame all week. “I have just been fishing up north,” she explains, watching with interest as I flounder into a hidden pool. “The air temperature was just six degrees. I have no idea how cold the water was, and the salmon were lying low.” No doubt rubbing their fins together to keep warm. Try as she might she hasn’t been able to entice them higher, to her selection of hand-tied flies.
West Rangá looks more promising, and several people have already hauled out Jeep-sized salmon this morning. This is one of Iceland’s best salmon rivers, number four in the Icelandic charts, and only two rods are allowed on each beat at a time. Royalty and rock stars helicopter in to try their luck. It is not cheap to fish there, but it is reliable, and the average catch hauls in eight pounds of fish.
Let me explain what that means. To those ignorant of the weight of salmon, eight pounds may not sound very much: a mere bagatelle. To the person holding the fat end of the rod, on the other hand, it feels like the accumulated weight of four bags of sugar, but with turbo-charged fins and a desperate will to be somewhere else in a hurry. Your average Icelandic salmon will fight like a kickboxer with a scorpion in his pants, and you can never be sure the battle is over until he is lying on the bank – preferably handcuffed to iron railings.
Kiri’s optimism has been recharged by a new fishing rod, a shiny, 11ft double-hander with her name etched up and down it, and no doubt all the way through like a stick of rock. She found it in her hotel room, much the way the rest of us find chocolates on our pillows. A present from an admirer. That’s the sort of thing that happens to international divas. Short of a stick of dynamite, it looked the very thing to prise a few salmon out of the water.
She feels at home with a fishing rod. “I’ve fished all my life,” she tells me. She was raised in Gisborne, New Zealand, by adoptive parents, Nell and Tom Te Kanawa. “My father would be out at five o’clock in the morning every morning, fishing for trout on the lake. Sometimes I’d be in the boat with my father; sometimes I’d just be sitting on the bank casting from the shore.” One morning, Tom caught 24 trout in four hours. “My mother and I did nothing but gut them.”
She tells the story of the time the boat capsized and nine-year-old Kiri nearly drowned. Instead of changing her out of her swimming suit, they took her to the local swimming pool, and encouraged her to get back in the water. She’s been a tough cookie ever since.
If nothing else, you need a certain toughness for fly-fishing, to cope with the physical demands. It is not as if you can just drop your hook into the water, Tom Sawyer-style, and lie back for the rest of the afternoon, chewing straw.
