In the wilds of northern Iceland, Jim Ratcliffe is on a mission to save the Atlantic salmon

Sir Jim Ratcliffe climbs into what feels like an old Land Rover Defender, but isn’t. “This is your Grenadier?” I ask, referring to the bulldog of a car the Ineos boss has been developing since Jaguar Land Rover upset every muddy-booted Brit by ceasing production of its classic bone-breaker. Ratcliffe, lanky and a touch scruffy, nods and looks over the control panel. Like a plastic surgeon judging body parts, the plastics baron says: “That will change, and that, and that.”

The car growls into life and we’re off. To our right the Selá carves its way through the treeless, edge-of-the-world tundra of north-east Iceland. It’s one of the truly great salmon rivers, and Ratcliffe now controls it, having bought it from the Strengur Angling Club in 2017.

In the past two decades, he has grown Ineos into one of the world’s largest petrochemical groups. Forbes estimates his wealth at $10.5bn. Now he is using some of this to conserve the Atlantic salmon, through a not-for-profit called the Six Rivers Project, which also offers guests some of the best fly-fishing in the world.

“The salmon is a special species,” he says, as he negotiates the rough track. “It survives for three years in this climate, then goes from freshwater to saltwater, heads to Russia or Svalbard, spends a year or two being chased by seals, and then comes back to the same river, flogging its way up all the rapids and the waterfalls.”

Which is where it meets him, waiting in the water like a slightly impatient heron. It’s one of the odd truths of conserving fish — as opposed to more cuddly creatures — that the only people who truly care for them are those prepared to pay to catch (and then release) them.

Ratcliffe engages low gear and turns into the river. We begin to ford but the water’s high and the car starts to shift sideways in the current. I look over and he laughs.

I have already realised it must be unnerving to be one of Ratcliffe’s friends. I’d met several of them the previous night in the Selá’s expansive fishing lodge.

Over prawn cocktails prepared by Johann Gunnar Arnarsson and Kristin Olafsdóttir of the Borg restaurant in Reykjavík, they’d been laughing about Ratcliffe’s 60th birthday. He’d issued them with motorcycles and led them from Mozambique to Namibia. One pal hit a culvert, cartwheeled, and landed on his head. “It was lucky we convinced you to buy that expensive Japanese helmet,” said another.

Now 70, Ratcliffe doesn’t seem to have mellowed much, but fly-fishing is less dangerous. We had been sitting at an oak table, drinking an astonishing Montrachet and looking out through picture windows at the river where it tips over a waterfall and froths into a chasm.

I used to fish this river in the late noughties. To a salmon angler like me Iceland is Asgard and the Selá is Valhalla. Instructed by one of the finest guides anywhere, Denni Björnsson, I had learned a variety of techniques in these clear waters, including some dark arts.

Back then we’d travel to the remote gorge upstream and I would tie on a red francis, a “fly” that looks like a prawn wearing a titanium crown. Denni would spot a fish and tell me to cast above it. The francis would land, sink, bounce along the bottom, then stop with a thud and I’d be into a furious fight.

Such fishing had been a revelation after years of throwing flies over the peaty streams of my native Scottish Highlands for paltry returns. Here I could see the salmon’s behaviour, work out what annoyed them, and catch them. But when I mention the red francis to Ratcliffe, he is unimpressed. “That’s not fly-fishing,” he says in a manner that brooked no response.

The lodge, which has just been renovated, is like something SpaceX might put on Mars. Corridors flooded with the far north’s otherworldly light lead to 10 cozy rooms full of russety bedclothes. A zinc bar sits under a wall spelling out the vision of the Six Rivers Project, alongside charts and graphs plotting the species’ decline.

“The Atlantic salmon is virtually extinct in North America and is already extinct in Germany, Holland and Belgium,” it reads. “You are supporting our conservation work through some of the finest catch-and-release salmon fishing in the world.”

Clearly, a lot of water has flowed past since my last visit, burbling out of the gorge to meander through the coastal plain and out to the cold, cold sea. Back then, on many Icelandic rivers, anglers would kill fish, carrying frozen salmon home. That is now — quite rightly — unacceptable.

According to the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization, the number of wild Atlantic salmon fell by more than half between 1983 and 2016. Of the 1,529 salmon rivers around the north Atlantic for which it has data, 174 no longer have salmon and in 1,014, populations are declining or at risk.

Still, I had been delighted to see Denni when I arrived, sitting in the sun outside the lodge’s boot room, sunglasses holding back his Beatles long hair. The guide is wonderful company on a riverbank — there is nowhere he’d rather be.

Better yet, he’d immediately taken me fishing and the differences in Ratcliffe’s tenure had become apparent. In the bear pool — Bjarnarhylur — he passed me a tiny fly (a size 14 Nagli if you want to know) and told me to cast straight across the river, holding the rod out. I was then to tweak the line, a very delicate approach for Denni, even if he had described the movement in a manner unsuitable for a family newspaper.

Very soon the line had been running fast through my fingers and I was looking up at a turbulent sky, thanking the fish gods (when I should have been thanking the guide). Once I had landed the salmon, pulled out the hook and watched it swim away, I leapt around. Within two hours I had hooked five fish and landed two.

By comparison, I once endured 13 days straight fishing in Scotland without a single bite.

Ratcliffe came to fly-fishing around the age of 50. He was trying to improve his golf swing and his coach, former Ryder Cup captain John Jacobs, tactfully suggested they go fishing in Iceland instead. “I got a monster salmon,” Ratcliffe tells me as the Grenadier emerges from the river unscathed. “My biggest fish. The next year, I took a bunch of friends.”

He met Gisli Asgeirsson, an Icelandic salmon fishing guru and conservationist and they set up Six Rivers. Using Ratcliffe’s financial clout they have taken over the management, and in some cases ownership, of six of the finest rivers in the most remote part of this already far-flung island.

I had been given a tour on my way in. Along 50 miles of coast I’d crossed all six rivers, seeing ground being broken for new lodges almost as luxurious as the one on the Selá. In the south is the Hofsá, 17 miles of exquisite fly-fishing including a pool under a high, rocky bank that was once kept for the exclusive use of Prince — now King — Charles.

Furthest north is a new addition, the Hafralónsá. It is close to where the last polar bear arrived in Iceland, exhausted and broken by its swim, only to be shot by the local farmer. This is Scandi-noir country. 

Ratcliffe’s takeover hasn’t been without its controversy. As a company, Ineos is no Patagonia (Ratcliffe will be delighted by the British government’s recent move to open up the UK to fracking). And his influence over the rivers was bought by buying up the remote, hardscrabble farms for their riparian rights.

He amassed so many that in 2020 the Icelandic government introduced a law to limit the amount of land one individual can own to 10,000 hectares, 0.1 per cent of the whole. “I don’t really mind,” says Ratcliffe, shrugging.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but there are a lot of humans on the planet and you know, we’re slowly eradicating all other living things

Six Rivers is instead proving its good intentions with good works. Ratcliffe, a chemical engineer by training, cleaves to science. The salmon are tagged and followed, both as smolts and when they go to sea. Waterfalls are circumnavigated to allow fish to spawn further into Iceland’s desolate interior. There is an annual symposium on the species in Reykjavík. 

They are even planting forests in this famously depilated country, in the hope of boosting the salmon’s food supply. And of course, there are the restrictions to the fishing. Although the new rules vary across the rivers, this means no more weighted flies like the red francis, there will be limited hours of fishing, and only four salmon can be caught in one session.

“Fishermen have to understand there needs to be a balance,” says Ratcliffe as we drive. “If the fishing pressure is too high, then the fish go away or die, and it’s game over.”

To this end, they want to welcome those who see fishing as part of a wider holiday instead of the obsessives like me. They plan to offer alternative activities such as mountain biking, skeet shooting, heli-skiing and skidoo driving.

We are passing the tiny cabin where I used to stay with my friends. I remember how much we loved it, and how hard we used to fish. We stopped coming when we were told we had to stay at the big new lodge being built downstream, the same lodge Ratcliffe has improved again, adding a presidential suite (not entirely fancifully — George HW Bush used to fish here).

While I know Ratcliffe is in general right, I am hit by a burst of melancholia and so, somewhat snottily, ask if his work to preserve salmon makes him reflect on owning vast plastic factories. To my surprise, he relaxes. “We couldn’t survive without plastic,” he says. “Look at Covid. Everybody wanted masks, rubber gloves, hypodermic syringes, ventilators. All that stuff’s made of plastic. You want an alternative? There’s always paper.”

We start on fracking and Asgeirsson, who is in the back, seems relieved when we pull up at a pool set against a cliff, a glorious tableau of rock, water and sky centred around a gyrfalcon nest.

Ratcliffe looks at me and says: “I think this is quite a decent thing to do. Don’t take this the wrong way, but there are a lot of humans on the planet and you know, we’re slowly eradicating all other living things. I get a lot of enjoyment out of seeing places like this.”

He walks into the pool and casts a long looping line out across the current, Asgeirsson at his shoulder. I sit on the bank where I am joined by Denni who has come to take me to the airport (at breakfast Ratcliffe had told his friends there would be a 10-mile lunchtime run through the high moors so I’m not entirely distraught).

Denni tells me to cheer up, that any changes that will allow us to sit on this riverbank chasing salmon in the years to come have to be a good thing. Ratcliffe wanders back empty-handed from the river, clearly gloomy. Denni offers the tiny, delicate nagli that caught all my fish the previous day — but is rejected. I flinch. In my experience, ignoring Denni is an error. Then again, it may be Ratcliffe’s best measure yet to let the Sela’s salmon swim on unmolested.

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter