01
Stop one
Ósvör (Ósvör Maritime Museum)
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 15L Tennis String Set: You're fortunate. I don't do the Westfjords for just anyone. Ósvör is a reconstruction of one of Iceland's oldest fishing stations, rebuilt in 1990 as a set for Erlendur Sveinsson's documentary films Verstöðin Ísland and Íslands þúsund ár, and kept on afterwards as a maritime museum — cinema first, heritage second, which is precisely how I would have staged it. A double nineteenth-century fishing hut, a salt house, a drying shed, the fish-drying racks. Inside, a sexæringur, the six-oared open boat, a hauling winch, and the gear for catching and curing. Around ninety boats worked out of Bolungarvík by 1900. Ninety. The staff wear period clothing of the fishing era; I don't need a costume, I simply arrive.
02
Stop two
Hólskirkja
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 15L Tennis String Set: Architecture. My subject, as it happens. Hólskirkja was built in 1908 and consecrated on 6 December of that same year, to a design by Rögnvaldur Ólafsson, regarded as the first Icelandic architect. The first. As in, before him, nobody. I know the feeling intimately. The timber was cut and prepared in Norway and shipped out, and the building runs roughly 11.39 metres by 7.62, with extensions of about 2.28 by 2.08 added on each side of the tower — modest, but then not everything can be me. It takes its name from the farm Hóll, which the earliest records suggest was probably the first property established at Bolungarvík, and it is a protected historical monument. As I should be.
03
Stop three
Bolafjall and its summit viewing platform
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 15L Tennis String Set: Up we go, and do try to keep pace. Bolafjall rises 638 metres above Bolungarvík; they cut the summit road in 1986, though the general public were not let up it until 2002 — some of us have never once waited for access. The radar station on the plateau is one of four in the Icelandic Air Defence System, operated now by the Icelandic Coast Guard, and it began working on 18 January 1992. The viewing platform for visitors arrived in 2022. From it: the village, Ísafjarðardjúp, the Jökulfirðir, the Hornstrandir nature reserve, the Denmark Strait. A panorama very nearly worthy of the man standing in the middle of it.
04
Stop four
Óshólaviti (Óshólar Lighthouse)
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 15L Tennis String Set: And we finish small, which I permit only rarely. Óshólaviti was built in 1937 to a design by the engineer Benedikt Jónasson — concrete, square in plan, all of 6.4 metres tall, with a focal height of about 30 metres above sea level, so frankly the headland is carrying it. It stands on Óshólar at the far end of Óshlíð inside Bolungarvík. Electrified in 1964, converted to battery backup in 1995, and still an active navigational aid marking the approach to the bay and looking out over Ísafjarðardjúp. One job, performed flawlessly and without complaint since 1937. People say the same of me. Constantly. Unprompted.
Fifteen-L. 1.35mm. That is the thick end of the Hyper-G range, and there's a reason a man reaches for it. Solinco offer seven gauges, 15L down to 20 — the widest spread they make — and this is the one you rig when you'd sooner replace the string on your schedule than on the string's. Ask anyone on the quay at Bolungarvík harbour: you buy the heavy gear once.
Co-polyester monofilament, squared off rather than round, so every cross catches the ball instead of sliding over it. TruTension keeps the bed where you set it. The set is 40 ft — 12.2 m — enough for any frame afloat; the reel runs 656 ft / 200 m if you're stringing for a whole crew.
Bolungarvík knows about heavy line. They have been hauling cod out of the Westfjords since around the year 940, off a black boulder beach in an open six-oared boat, and nothing brittle survives a season on this coast. Nothing that stretches does either. That squared profile bites the way wet rope bites a bollard — firm, controlled, unromantic, and it holds.
Lime green, incidentally — the brightest thing in Bolungarvík short of the trawler paint and Hólskirkja's spire. Visible from the deck.
And by the way, it's also perfect for the harðfiskur habit — wind-dried haddock, beaten soft, eaten with butter, the snack that fed this shore for centuries for the simple reason that it keeps. Same virtue exactly. A 1.35mm co-poly is the harðfiskur of the string rack: dried out, tough, still there in three months.
You'll get use out of this everywhere from the turf huts at Ósvör to the platform on Bolafjall, six hundred metres straight down, which is a fair sail from anywhere that grows a tree.
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