The first month of 2020 hasn’t been easy for the Icelandic fleet, with exceptionally bad weather for much of January
Síldarvinnslan’s factory trawler Blængur has finished its first trip of the year, with a green weight of 530 tonnes of mainly redfish and saithe.
“We sailed on 12th January and the weather made lift difficult for the first two weeks,” said skipper Bjarni Ólafur Hjálmarsson.
“Because of the conditions, we had to work off the north and east, until we were able to move to fishing grounds off the south coast. There were able to do well on silver smelt, redfish and saithe. We’re satisfied with the results of this trip, even though the weather made the first part of it a challenge.”
Brim’s factory trawler Vigri has also completed its first trip of the year for a green weight of 600 tonnes of mixed fish and a month at sea that took them all around Iceland.
“We started on the Hali grounds. That’s where we had some good fishing for saithe. We managed to head west to the Thveráll Gully and had some fishing for haddock, before an oncoming storm forced us to shelter in the Ísafjörður Deep,” said skipper Eythór A Scott.
“We spent 12 hours dodging there before the weather moderated. That opened a 12-hour window for us. There were two options open to us – to steam away as soon as possible and try for better conditions off the east, or stay there in the Ísafjörður Deep for the next week. So we opted to steam east.”
Vigri and its crew had some good fishing off the east of Iceland, although this was mainly cod, which wasn’t the ideal species. As the weather moderated, Vigri steamed back to the west coast for golden redfish mixed with cod and saithe in the Víkuráll Gully, before finishing the trip with some redfish on the Eldey Bank off the south-west coast, before heading to Reykjavík as the trip came to an end.
Another of Brim’s trawlers has also finished its first trip of the year and Höfrungur III’s skipper Haraldur Árnason said that there has been crazy weather since the beginning of the year.
“The weather’s beyond our control and all we can do is to search out places where we can continue to work. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t,” he said.
