23 August 2024, 04:03
Michael RobinsonGREENLAND AND ICELAND 2024 - TOURISM AND HUNTING REPORT
GREENLAND AND ICELAND 2024 TOURISM AND HUNTING REPORTWe just returned from a two week vacation/hunting trip, which we began with a five day stay in Iceland and finished with what was supposed to be a six day but ended up being a four day musk ox and caribou hunt in southwestern Greenland.
OUTFITTER: Lax-á Angling Club, Akurhvarf 16, 203 Kópavogur, Iceland.
HUNTING DATES: Originally scheduled for 11 August through 16 August 2024 (six hunting days in total, not counting travel days), but shortened to four hunting days because of bad weather that prevented our IcelandAir flight from landing at Narsarsuaq in Greenland on the front end of the trip.
BOOKING AGENT: John Barth, Adventure Unlimited, Inc., 4909 Oakmont Drive, Corpus Christi, TX 78413.
TRAVEL AGENT: Lax-á served as our travel agent as well as our outfitter, including assisting with booking hotels and a rental car in Iceland and handling all of the paperwork with the Reykjavik police for my rifle and ammunition.
GAME TAKEN: Greenland musk ox and Greenland caribou.
GAME SOUGHT BUT NOT TAKEN: None.
AIRLINE: IcelandAir.
I am sure IcelandAir thought they were doing their best, but their service could have and should have been far better.
We encountered bad weather – rain and heavy fog – at the Narsarsuaq airport in Greenland at the front end of our trip. The airport is tiny and rather primitive and, as I understand it, operates under visual flight rules only.
Our pilot attempted to land twice, but visibility was so poor that he had to abort both times. We held on tight as he climbed and banked sharply both times to get us out of the mountain valley where the airport is located. We ended up returning to Reykjavik.
Clearly the weather was not IcelandAir’s or our pilot’s fault. So we were pleasantly surprised that IcelandAir took responsibility for it nonetheless. They put the entire planeload of people up in a hotel while they sorted out the rescheduling of our flight.
Unfortunately, the only hotel big enough and with the number of free rooms needed to accommodate us was located two hours north of the Keflavik international airport, itself located about 45 minutes outside of Reykjavik.
We ended up in a hot, tiny room in a hotel in Varmaland, a/k/a the middle-of-nowhere, Iceland. I will say that the hotel was clean and the restaurant was good, given its location and its function as a remote stopping place for random travelers. Luckily, both Lindy and I had good books to read, because there was virtually nothing else to do.
Where IcelandAir fell down on the job was in not communicating with us, their stranded passengers. Never did they contact us, and when we contacted them, we got contradictory and confusing information about when our flight to Greenland would be rescheduled. They treated us like the proverbial mushrooms – they kept us in the dark and covered us in bullshit.
Finally, on the morning of the second day in the hotel, we were told by the hotel, and not by IcelandAir, that a bus would be arriving at noon to take us back to the Keflavik airport for our rescheduled flight to Narsarsuaq at 17:30.
After we heard the good news from the hotel, we contacted Lax-á right away and they were able to confirm the new flight details and assured us that four days would be more than enough time for successful hunts for both musk ox and caribou. Happily, as things turned out, they were right.
We landed in Narsarsuaq that evening without any problems. The arrivals and departures areas are a few feet apart and there are picnic tables in between them. There is no customs or passport control whatsoever, nor is a firearms permit needed.
For more details on this unfortunate travel fiasco, please see Larry Shores’ report here: Goat F@ck, with which I could not agree more. Larry, we missed you and your lovely wife on this trip, and we hope that one day, when time and circumstances permit, you can find a way to make it happen.
RIFLE: On this slightly sub-arctic safari I took my Blaser R93 Synthetic rifle in .338 Win. Mag. caliber with a Schmidt & Bender 2.5-10x56mm Zenith Flash Dot variable power scope (with a switch-on illuminated No. FD7 reticle) on top in a Blaser saddle mount. My old eyes love the S&B scopes and especially the ones with illuminated reticles.
The Blaser disassembles and when placed in its Negrini take-down case with fitted cover, it is relatively small and very handy and easy to carry around. When reassembled on site it always returns exactly to zero. My Blasers are by far my favorite traveling rifles.
A big reason I had never hunted in Greenland before this trip is that every outfitter with whom I have discussed it has told me to forget about bringing my own rifle.
Not Lax-á. They told me it was easy to do, at least when transiting Iceland, and they were absolutely correct.
With their help on this trip, which amounted to getting me a one-page permit from the Reykjavik police, I had zero problems bringing my rifle and 40 rounds of ammunition loaded with 225 grain Trophy Bonded Bear Claw bullets to Greenland via Iceland and then taking the rifle (and fewer rounds of ammo!) back home.
ICELAND:
On the front end of our trip, we spent three days seeing some of the sights in Reykjavik and southern Iceland. Three days is not enough time to do very much, but I do recommend blocking out as much time as one can for tourism.
The natural beauty of Iceland is amazing, the food is fantastic and the people speak English and are helpful and welcoming. Some photos from our tour of Iceland are below.
The Hallgrímskirkja:
Monumental statue of Leif Erikson outside the church:
The Seljalandsfoss falls in southern Iceland:
The Skógafoss falls not far to the east:
Random and beautiful geothermal activity in the countryside:
The Dyrhólaey headland and black sand beach on the south coast, along with a couple of specimens of an invasive species:
The Sólheimajökulls glacier and its attendant icebergs:
Right out of current events, here are a couple of photos of now cooled and hardened lava flows from the Sundhnukur volcano that erupted on the Reykjanes Peninsula near Grindavik in June of this year. The lava flows closed roads and forced the evacuation of the town:
GREENLAND:
The Lax-á hunting camp is located three hours by boat from Narsarsuaq. It is a well-constructed and laid out camp, with individual cabins for the hunters, clean and spacious communal toilet and shower facilities, a sauna and a large kitchen and dining cabin where all meals are served.
We especially appreciated the skill of our Czech cooks, Lenke and Lada, who are trained chefs and worked wonders with the fish, game, vegetables and delicious desserts that provided our sustenance.
The sights and sounds on the boat ride to and from camp were fascinating.
Th’ar she blows, just off the port bow:
And th’ar she goes, too:
A massive glacier where it met the fjord – that wall of ice is around 1-200 feet high:
Icebergs of great size and a bluish hue were virtually everywhere:
GUIDES: Our guides were the camp manager, Bear, and a local man, named Otto.
Otto knows the area like the native Greenlander he is and expertly piloted his six meter long fiberglass, V-hulled boat equipped with a 300 HP Yamaha outboard engine in and around the many fjords. What a screaming beast of a rig that boat turned out to be!
We learned that Otto’s nickname around these parts is “Full-Throttle” Otto and for good reason. We regularly hit speeds of 45 knots while cruising from fjord to fjord in search of game.
There are no roads in these hunting grounds. Only fjords. All travel is by boat or on foot. We came to appreciate our survival suits and the layers of warm clothing we wore beneath them.
We peeled them off when hunting, but the suits were mandatory while in the open boats:
Bear, who with his wife Guðrún is responsible for managing the entire camp, is also an excellent guide and a great guy. He knows the hunting area very well from having guided hunters there for many years.
These Icelanders and Greenlanders hunt hard and as a result of their efforts we had great success in very short order.
MUSK OX:
We were told that there was a large herd of musk ox, numbering nearly a thousand animals, that had occupied some rich, fairly mountainous grazing land about a two hour boat ride from camp. So that is where we headed in three boats at 6:00 on the first morning of hunting.
There were three hunters in camp after musk ox and caribou, and one hunter who wanted two caribou but did not have a tag for a musk ox. The musk ox guides were several in number and specialized in those animals only. Our caribou hunter headed off in a different direction after caribou while we three left with our guides in our three boats to hunt the musk ox.
The idea was that we would hunt in shifts. When hunting from a boat, at least in this area of Greenland, the only way to reach the game is by going up. Water does flow downhill, after all. This area in the southwest is quite mountainous.
The first of us to hunt that day, Eddie, who had booked this hunt together with Larry and me, and his several musk ox guides had barely gone ashore when, as we watched from one of the boats, they came upon a bull musk ox hunkered down in the brush at the foot of a small mountain (or big hill, not sure what to call it).
The bull was no more than fifty yards away from him and Eddie put him down with two quick shots. He did not have to climb anything or anywhere but out of the boat!
After that rather anticlimactic event, I went ashore with the third hunter and we began to climb the small mountain or big hill, whatever you want to call it. Our guides told us that just over the ridge, which was about 400 meters or so above us, we should find some grazing bulls.
To sum it up, our musk ox hunting consisted of this one hike up this one steep hill. When we got to the top I was huffing and puffing away and had just managed to catch my breath when our guides motioned for us to get up to the line of boulders right on the ridge.
We did, and when I looked over, I saw two big bull musk ox no more than 40 yards away grazing placidly and totally unaware of our presence. I rested my rifle on one of the boulders, waited for a while, and then at my guide’s direction took a quartering shot into the right shoulder of the bull nearest to me. I instantly reloaded and prepared to shoot again, but my stricken bull simply turned in a tight circle and dropped dead on the spot.
My fellow hunter, who had set up to my left and slightly above me, then killed the other bull with a broadside shot just behind the shoulder. His bull was about 5 yards closer to us than mine had been.
As Tony Soprano would say, “Bada bing, bada bang, bada boom!” Three musk ox bulls down and in the boats before noon.
Here are some photos.
Where he fell:
For a size comparison – one ox behind another:
Musk ox are huge, prehistoric looking animals. They inspire awe and respect in me, as a hunter. They have survived for eons in Greenland, and because of good conservation practices, consisting of low annual quotas and hunting off-take limited to old bulls, they are thriving there today.
CARIBOU:
While we were dispatching our musk ox, the other hunter who was after caribou managed to kill two of them. Yes, that’s right. Two in one day.
We learned that caribou are everywhere in this hunting area. I probably saw close to one hundred caribou of all sexes and sizes in my three days of hunting. To say that the Lax-á hunting grounds are a game-rich area is an understatement.
The next day, I went caribou hunting with “Full Throttle” Otto. Eddie and the other remaining caribou hunter in camp went hunting in a separate boat with Bear and another local guide. Each of them shot their bull on that day, which was only the second day of hunting. Good bulls, both.
Otto and I did not have as much luck, although we did see some bulls that were definitely shooters. The problem with the bulls we saw, which sometimes happens when hunting from a boat, is that they were unreachable. There was just nowhere to land the boat. The caribou were standing on sheer cliffs, from which they stared at us in imperious glory.
The next day our luck would change, at least to some extent.
It was extremely windy that day. Just brutal. The wind was blowing constantly all day long at a steady 20-25 miles per hour with gusts harder than that.
We saw and stalked four good bulls. The first one was maybe the best. We had seen him from the boat and then beached it and set up for a shot.
He had busted us and was facing us head on, staring right at us, at 165 yards. The cross-wind was howling and I had a shaky rest on a boulder – I couldn’t get the elevation I needed so I had to shoot resting my elbow on the rock – and I missed him clean. Why? Wind, Wheezing, Wobbles and Whatever – not necessarily but probably in that order. I just missed.
I took a Hail Mary running shot at him as he sped away, but I missed that shot, too.
A shot taken is always a maybe and a shot not taken is always a miss. So has my motto always been.
We stalked two more bulls but never could close the deal. They would not stay put, but would move while they were out of our sight as we tried to move closer and stay downwind. When and if we saw them again they were not shoot-at-able.
Then we found one that cooperated with us and my poor shooting just enough to make the difference. He was alone and had a good rack. I got a shot at him offhand as he paused at about 200 yards away while he was moving up and over an open mountain (or big hill, see above) meadow.
Well, the 4W’s intervened and I missed him.
He kept going up the hill with us chasing after him and I took another offhand shot at him when he stopped and looked back at about 250 yards. You guessed it: 4W’s again. Missed clean.
I tried again when he topped the ridge at just under 300 yards and with the beating I was taking from the 4W’s I only managed to kill more air.
Now, you must understand that there was nothing in the way of a rest up there. A set of shooting sticks would have been just the ticket. But they don’t use them and so I was shooting from my hind legs only. My story is the 4W’s ganged up on me and I’m sticking to it.
Well, we hustled down and around the mountain/big hill and caught up to this bull yet again. These animals are naïve when it comes to hunting and hunting pressure and don’t seem overly bothered even by hot pursuit and gunshots. Lucky for me.
This time, to paraphrase my friend Saeed, my bull “got in the way of my bullet” at 175 yards, again in high wind. But this time I had a good, solid rest and the wind was blowing straight at me from the caribou’s direction. I hit him on the point of his right shoulder and he dropped dead right where he stood.
I would have understood if Bear and Otto had fallen to their knees and thanked their Gods.
I believe I heard them invoke the names Odin and Thor, and maybe even Loki, under their breath.
Where he fell:
Dasher and Dancer maybe?
Here are Bear, on the left, me and Otto, with our noble quarry:
These caribou are lovely animals. Mine had lots of white mixed with gray in his coat. He was still in velvet, which I gather is unusual this late in the season.
And he is about as different from a musk ox as one can imagine!
* * *
Despite the weather and airline communication issues at the outset, we did enjoy this trip enormously.
Greenland is as stark, rugged, wild and beautiful as any wilderness on earth. Not a place to mess with.
But the folks at Lax-á have managed to bring a modicum of civilization and a real hunting ethic to it, and as a wandering hunter, I am certainly grateful.
