It’s cod season once again in the far north of Norway, and Røst—a distant scatter of rocky islets off the outermost idea of Norway’s Lofoten Islands—is once more the honeypot for fishermen looking for jackpot paychecks from the beneficial dried cod trade, Norway’s oldest export sector, relationship again into the Viking times.

. “A land in the Arctic Ocean that every one the boys together the Coastline dreamed of traveling to someday, a land where exploits have been done, fortunes were being created, and where fishermen sailed within a race with Demise. As a result of many yrs they had migrated thither, and a lot of of them experienced lost their lives on The ocean.

Then the catch is rendered into stockfish—the nutritious cod jerky that after sustained the Vikings on their long sea voyages and, today, is really a highly prized delicacy in Italy, where it’s a essential ingredient in conventional regional dishes from Venice, Naples, Genoa, and Calabria.

It was generally a dangerous proposition, all the greater so in an age of adjusting climates. “Banking institutions are usually not keen to lend that sort of cash to young people just getting started,” states Pedersen.

It’s 11 o’clock on a dim, chilly, blustery morning in February, having a feeble arctic Sunlight hardly peeping around the horizon, and the harbor at Røstlandet is usually a hive of exercise. A few boats are tied up to the wharf, delivering their bounties of fresh caught cod, although the skipper of A different boat nestles his craft right into a slot freshly vacated by a fourth.

Immediately after his boat sank, he invested three pleasant months While using the islanders, and on his return to Italy, offered an account of his adventures to your Venetian senate.

Each and every Wintertime, for greater than a thousand a long time, Norwegian fishermen have flocked to these components to scoop up the bounty of massive, meaty migrating cod that appear streaming down via the tens of millions from the Barents Sea to breed One of the reefs and shoals around the Lofoten Islands, and most especially below all over Røst.

From the switch of the twentieth century, more than 30,000 fishermen had been flocking to these islands Each individual winter. Grainy buy stockfish black-and-white photos clearly show Røst’s harbors so jammed with boats that it had been possible to stroll from just one aspect to the opposite with no getting your toes moist.

If the temperate waters on the Gulf Stream enter the grounds across the Lofoten archipelago, the temperature is precisely ideal for that Norwegian Arctic cod to spawn. Big cod swim down from the Barents Sea in the middle of the darkest winter, and come to be generally known as 

The drying process for stockfish takes close to three (three) months. Very first, the head and guts are taken out along with the fish is tied together within the tail, in pairs, and hung on wood racks or lofts to dry inside the open clean cold air.

Norwegian stockfish hangs out by The ocean in Northern Norway on drying racks from February to May perhaps, and is on the market all year spherical.

Nergård has use of fish from a few of the finest managed stocks on the planet – from the coastal and ocean-going fleets and our very own trawlers. We deliver products and solutions according to whitefish including cod, haddock and saithe, together with Greenland halibut and redfish, and numerous other whitefish species with far more modest volumes.

The pure air and the chilly winter local climate from January to April are perfect components Within this special approach – without question the oldest approach to fish preservation and also the minimum Power-consuming in the world.

An inconceivable new trade route was born, linking the Renaissance town states then comprising Italy with the lonely windswept isles of Røst.