A group of French fishermen from the west coast port of Les Sables d’Olonne have spent a week familiarising themselves with Icelandic methods of seine netting.
Of the group of nine who spent a week with Lárus Thór Pálmason and his colleagues at NesNet, five are working skipper/owners of 24m trawlers who are keen to adapt their vessels and fishing operations so that they can alternate trawling with seine netting, depending on the seasons and conditions.
The group spent time at the VT Fishing Supplies workshops in Grindavík with master netmaker Hördur Jónsson, studying full-size fishing gears and also were able to observe and study seine net performance using scale models towed in a ISCFT mini-flume tank.
Several of the group took the opportunity to spend a couple of days at sea with local seine net boats Farsæll and Benni Sæm, and the group was also able to make a series of visits to companies and organisations, including the Directorate of Fisheries, Marorka, Icelandic New Energy, fishing gear suppliers Hampidjan and Ísfell, and also fishing company Stakkavík.
Daníel Sigurdsson from winch manufacturer Ósey introduced the French skippers to the type of seine net winches he has been producing both in Iceland and in cooperation with Dutch company TCD for the European market, and finally Fridrik G Halldórsson of the Icelandic Federation of Seine Netters made a presentation of the how the Federation works and who it represents.
"The request for the five-day trip to Iceland came through French regional fisheries and aquaculture development SMIDAP," said Lárus Thór Pálmason of NesNet, the company that organised the trip to Iceland.
"Some of these fishermen had already been here before and been on short study trips with us in the past. They showed a lot of interest in the fly-shooting method of seine netting in the way it is done in Iceland and are looking to use this method of fishing in their own waters for part of the year."
The group left Iceland after a highly satisfactory visit, in spite of the less-than-perfect weather that kept the local seine netters in for a couple of days.
