Brim’s fresher trawler Helga María has been fishing on Westfjords grounds all summer, and catches have been fine, according to skipper Friðleifur Einarsson.
This is a different situation to the previous few summers during which the Brim trawlers worked off the north coast while the Westfjords were practically bare of fish.
Helga María is back at sea after landing 170 tonnes in Reykjavík. Most of this was cod, plus an amount of redfish and some other species such as saithe and haddock.
‘We started on the shallow grounds, the Látragrunn area and around there, then we took our redfish in the Víkuráll Gully and moved on to finish up on cod on the Kögurgrunn grounds,’ he said, adding that saithe have been seen at intervals.
‘We try to avoid haddock as much as possible and there’s redfish everywhere. The redfish has been giving way on the Hali grounds, and earlier in the summer we just couldn’t work there due to the volume of redfish. There hasn’t been much fish on the banks north of Patreksfjörður during the later part of the summer, but we can expect that to change.’
Approaching the end of the current quota year, Friðleifur Einarsson isn’t expecting any changes of focus as the new quota year opens.
‘The market dictates fishing and production, and we just go and fetch the catch that’s needed,’ he said.
