The recipient of the IceFish 2024 Outstanding Skipper Award, Eiríkur Sigurðsson has brought a new level of imagination to the job

He’s only just stepped ashore – temporarily – from freezer trawler Reval Viking, one of the fleet of trawlers operated by Icelandic-owned Estonian company Reyktal. Now he’s facing a new challenge to develop gear and techniques that he hopes will change the way shrimp are caught, turning this from one of the most fuel-hungry fisheries to a gentler, more economical way of catching.

Eiríkur Sigurðsson’s fishing career goes back a long way, starting at 10-years-old on jigging boats fishing from Húsavík in the north of Iceland, and working his way up to crew on larger and larger vessels.

“I went to take my certificates as soon as I possibly could, and was sailing as skipper at 20. I’ve been in the wheelhouse ever since,” he recalled.

Sigurðsson has been fishing for shrimp since 1984, when shrimping boomed in Iceland, working first in home waters and then as this expanded, to Flemish Cap. This took him to the wheelhouses of some of the most modern shrimp trawlers in the fleet, including Pétur Jónsson, as co-skipper opposite its owner Pétur Stefánsson, and later Ontika, owned by Reyktal. Fishing grounds have also included both west and east Greenland.

“West Greenland was the most exciting fishing, with some very heavy fishing there,” he said.

Today Reval Viking operates on fishing grounds off east Greenland, and in the Barents Sea – all the way up to areas around Svalbard.

“We’ve been a long way north. All the way up to 82°30’N. There’s shrimp to be found all the way up to where the continental shelf ends and drops away into very deep water.”