Fjarðanet’s netmaker and trawl designer Hermann Guðmundsson has developed a revolutionary new demersal trawl that is constructed differently to demersal trawls already on the market.
Fjarðanet has always worked on developing new ideas and has put a great deal of effort into these developments in co-operation with Hampidjan and the Marine Research Institute.
Guðmundsson says that the idea for the new trawl arose when he was working on the development of a sorting grid for blue whiting. This involved working with netting in a T90 configuration that needed to be cut and mounted in completely different way to those he was used to. In tank tests, this was shown to work extremely well – better than had been expected. “What we found was that by using the T90 configuration, less netting was needed in the trawl, which gives better water flow through the gear and therefore less resistance. This is certainly an innovation and as far as I know, using T90 netting in a complete trawl hasn't been done before, either here or abroad,” Guðmundsson says.
He goes on to add, “We took this to the flume tank in Hirtshals, Denmark to test a model. These tests came out so well that we decided to set up a full-size trawl to test on board research vessel “Árni Fridriksson” on a trip off the western Fjords. We were able to film the trawl in use with the Marine Research Institute's new underwater cameras and this confirmed all the positive points about this trawl that we had expected, not least the unusual way of using the netting.”
More recently the trawl has also been undergoing more tests on a commercial trawler and Hermann says that the experience has been positive, with the skipper certain that catches are better in this trawl than in conventional gear of the same size.
“This trawler's owners have now gone ahead and bought one of these T90 trawls,” he says. “I think it is also unique in this business that we were able to design a trawl, test it at full size, film the trials and then hand a skipper a disk of the film. 'There you go, that's what you trawl looks like in the water.' This shows exactly how important for the Marine Research Institute and for future fishing gear development the acquisition of this equipment was.”
Guðmundsson says that although there were a few teething difficulties that appeared during the trial trip, these will all be ironed out for the commercial trawls that are being prepared.
