However, one sure way to attract interest was to highlight the labour saving aspects of the machine in question. Not only is labour expensive, but today young people don’t want to go to sea anyway, according to Runar Birgisson, fish division manager, Marel Food Systems of Iceland. Thus there is yet another reason for purchasing equipment that can cut down on the number of people employed to process fish onboard.
Mr Birgisson was keen to point out how labour could be saved in conjunction with the company’s new onboard flowline system described in last month’s issue. Eight to ten stations for trimming fillets are typical for an onboard flowline he said, but the number of staff required depends on what pre-grading, if any, takes place before the fillets are fed on to the line.
Pre-grading by machine can lead to increased throughput in the flowline, and one person less is needed in the processing section of the vessel, he said.
Trimming is done by hand, but as everything is weighed, including the trimmings, at each station, it is easy for managers to weed out the less efficient operatives, thus maximising the yield of the raw material. Often in onboard processing, speed is of the essence, for example when processing redfish which are just de-headed and frozen, said Mr Birgisson, and is regarded as being of more importance than yield. But in these days of scarce raw material, onboard processors want to use as much of the catch as possible.
Grading fish onboard a fishing vessel is becoming more important, according to Olafur Fridriksson, product sales manager – weighing, grading and batching for Marel. Grading the catch before landing it to a port market maximises its value, he said, and the grading, or batching, of bulk catches such as pelagic fish and shrimp before freezing onboard ensures that the batches frozen are always of the same weight, which is often necessary for government regulations.
Marel’s speed batchers typically sort the catch into 12-20 batches per minute – 20 x 1kg batches of shrimp and 12 x 20-30kg of pelagic fish. "Our speed batcher is very successful for use in pelagic fisheries," said Mr Fridriksson.
Interestingly, even though I referred to Marel as a one-stop-shop last month, Mr Birgisson admitted that Baader equipment would typically be used for de-heading and filleting whitefish species before the fillets entered the Marel flowline. (Marel is moving in the other direction in processing, and since the acquisition of Stork Food Systems last year will become more involved in providing equipment for the manufacture of value-added seafood products.)
All equipment, from whichever manufacturer, needs to be robust and reliable as factory vessels cannot afford to carry engineers onboard, and any repairs, modifications, the installation of new equipment, etc need to be carried on a very tight schedule when the vessel is in port.
