Helga Jóhannesdóttir and her husband Gummi spend their summers on the Skáleyjar Islands, collecting eiderdown from around 5,000 nests.

“My plan is always to get in shape before eiderdown season begins, but then I forget,” laughs Helga María Jóhannesdóttir, as she bends down to collect the down from one of the eider nests on Skáleyjar islands, her private little paradise. She and her husband, Guðmundur Kristján Snorrason, live in Grundarfjörður on Snæfellsnes peninsula, south of Breiðafjörður Bay, but come to the islands to spend their summers there. “I wish I could just stay here now,” she says with a dreamy smile. Helga is a teacher, and still has one week of work left before the summer break. Then Helga and Gummi, as he’s called, bring their family to Skáleyjar Islands to pick down from the approximately 5,000 nests on almost 130 islands, islets, and skerries. Helga says they all like helping out, “but the kids sometimes get bored because they have to walk all day.”  

Island life is in Helga’s blood. She and her sister Hildigunnur lived with their mother in the small island community on Flatey. Still, they spent their holidays with their father and uncle on Skáleyjar, where no one else lived at the time. “This was our car!” says Helga of an old wooden rowboat, stored in one of the outbuildings. But one Christmas in the early 1980s, the “car” failed. “January came and we wanted to go back to our mom on Flatey, but it was so cold that the sea froze, and we couldn’t get there by boat. So, my dad figured we should walk. We packed our things and walked out on the ice. There were other islands in between, so we could walk on land, too. We had walked almost all the way to Svefneyjar, about 10 km [6 miles], when there was no more ice. We had to shout across to the people! There were no cell phones, but we had called ahead, so they knew we were coming—and they sent a boat to pick us up. From Svefneyjar we could take a boat to Flatey. By then, the ice was starting to shift, and my dad had to get back to milk the cows, so he ran across the ice so that he wouldn’t get stranded on one of the islands.” 

Helga’s father, Jóhannes, or Jói, still lives on Skáleyjar in the summer but spends his winters at a nursing home in Reykhólar. He grew up on the islands and remembers when they were full of life. “There were four homes, three where the farmers lived with their families and one where the workers resided. 40–50 people were living here then, and there were many children to play with,” Jói reminisces. The island children of Breiðafjörður were schooled in a certain way. “The teacher moved between the islands and spent three months in each place. During that period, there was school all day.” At other times, the children helped with farm work. They also picked eggs from the nests of seabirds, caught fish and seals and were mostly self-sufficient. “The seal meat was salted, and the heads preserved in whey. Seal was a fixed feature on our dinner tables throughout most of the year,” says Jói. The seal skins were sold, providing extra income for the farmers. 

So did the eiderdown; eider farming is a long-standing tradition on the Breiðafjörður islands, going back centuries, to the first settlers around the year 1,000. During Jói’s childhood, the farmers cleaned all the down themselves. Jói is concerned about documenting islands’ history, setting up a heritage museum at Skáleyjar with old furniture, tools, and other objects, and creating a registry of all the place names on the islands. “I need to keep myself busy at the nursing home,” he chuckles. “How many place names you think there are? About 900! But, I must add that I made up some of them myself.” 