Today we backtracked to Siglufjordur - 80 km through the four tunnels to do the Herring Era Museum. Of course first we had lunch which consisted of open face sandwiches, one with marinated herring and one with smoked herring with egg and tomatoes on Icelandic black bread(a treat on its own). The fish was like what we get at home, but much better and fresher.
The Herring Museum consists of three buildings
. The first shows the people and their lifestyle involved in unloading the fish from the boats and the processing and packaging for export. The living quarters were most interesting. Some of the supplies and furnishings and business machines reminded us of our own past as this area was in its heyday until 1969. This industry at one time represented as much as 35%25 of Iceland's GNP.
The next building had a fish meal processing plant. Whatever fish was unsuitable for processing or parts cleaned off the edible fish (heads and guts) were cooked and mashed. Straining and pressing yielded fish oil to make paints, cosmetics, or soaps. The solid mass left over was dried to make fish meal to feed livestock in Europe.
The third building had old boats which were used over the years to catch the fish. There were scale models of the giant trawlers which caught so much in the 1960's that the fishery closed in 1969 due to a lack of fish in the area. It has since recovered but the process is so changed and modernized that it is hardly the same operation. In the mid sixties they produced over thirty million barrels of fish and fish meal annually!
We returned to Akureyri at the end of the day. Dinner was again a great experience. Lobster and fish soup, Icelandic catfish ( firm thick fish from the ocean - delicious and not like ours ) and flourless chocolate cake.
Tomorrow we go to Lake Myvatn.
Herring Era Museum
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Siglufjörður, Northeast, Iceland
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Comments

2025-02-09
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Goldie Dacks
2013-09-23
Glad to see you're having such an amazing time! Your meals sound a lot better than what we experienced on the bus tour!