Bob Mainprize, skipper and owner of the "Maggie M", a trawler fishing in the North Sea, installed a Notus trawl monitoring system to monitor his single and twin rig gear over two years ago.
On the twin rig gear, Notus monitors the spread on each net, measures the three trawl wires, calculates the middle wire adjustment and monitors catch in the cod-end. The "Maggie M" is currently fishing in four different fisheries, using:
• Twin rig for nephrops in a water depth of 80-140m
• Twin rig for mixed white fish in all depths of water
• Single trawl for mixed white fish in deep water from 100-500m
Notus recently received a message from Bob, detailing his success with the system:
"At a total of 200m, we were getting between 80 and 100m of spread with the 3m doors. We do not have to guess what our middle wire uptake should be, and we also know how much and where we catch the fish as we're using the system with catch sensors.
The amazing thing is that I can go back tow by tow in the history and find out what dates, times and positions we caught the fish.
When twin trawling we were able to turn more than I would have ever expected, this could not have been done without the Notus gear. We have never had any problems with Notus equipment.
What can I say - 450t in 10 weeks fishing in the North Sea!"
