Is this the maritime version of the Serengeti? Our featured contributor Lola Akinmade Åkerström tracks down Sweden’s own ‘Big Five’ on a seafood safari and follows her dinner from the ocean to her plate.
Martin looks over his shoulder to make sure we have properly braced ourselves as we stand scattered on the back hull of his weathered fishing trawler. Huddled alongside his cargo of about two dozen wooden fish traps were a handful of travelers, me included, donning bright yellow fishermen’s jackets and rain pants we’d borrowed from his fishing shed.
Despite our costume attempts, we clearly looked out of place on his rustic boat. With a grin of amusement, local fisherman Martin Olofsson pulled us further away from Smögen, a postcard-perfect fishing village where he has been running Smögens Fiske & Skärgårdsturer for decades alongside his father, Tommy.
The Olofsson family history of fishing dates back to the 1700s and they mostly harvest crayfish and langoustines from the depths of one of the world’s cleanest water sources—the North Atlantic Ocean, also known as the North Sea.
Local fishermen invite travelers onto their trusted trawlers to journey side-by-side and haul lobsters and crayfish together, as well as harvest oysters and mussels from sea beds.
Many of the insanely photogenic villages—think colorful wooden cottages in varying shades of red and yellow strewn across various rocky outcroppings surrounded by dark aquamarine waters—along West Sweden’s Bohuslän coastline are known for a specific type of shellfish.
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For example, around Smögren, fishermen harvest tons of crayfish and langoustines around Smögen. In the waters around Marstrand, with its large villas at the foothills of the Carlstens Fortress, you’ll find ‘black gold’—lobsters—while the village of Grebbestad produces roughly 90 per cent of all Sweden’s oysters.
And it was right at the dock of fisherman Per Karlsson’s 19th-century boathouse, Everts Sjöbod, where I harvested my own oysters before heading out on a safari with him around the surrounding archipelago.
