Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

We got off to a good start with some very good fishing for the first trip back, which we were all very glad to see, but it came as a bit of a shock to the system after being laid up for so long. The fishing was so heavy that I ended up with blisters on my fingers from the amount of gutting, I'm not complaining though, but I have told my wife that if we are in for so long again I will have

We arrived back in Newlyn on sunday afternoon after a four day steam from macduff. We had a good run down and we were lucky enough to get the tide right in the north channel and we once again reached over 14knots. There was a large spring tide over the weekend, which we tried to use to our advantage on the steam down. In some places we got it right but in other places it was quite slow going, one

We left MacDuff yesterday evening after getting the all clear from Roddy and David, the engineers. We headed north by west for the Pentland Firth. The run was good upto the Pentland with a light NW 4-5 breeze, but when we entered the firth (which is the straits between the Orkneys and the north of Scotland) we were met by quite a large westerly swell and were hurtling along in a 9 knot tidal race

Sorry for not blogging for so long, but the boat is still up in macduff. We found further problems with the stern gear when we went to leave last week and it turned out that the stern tube had dropped ever so slightly, so once again the yard pulled out all the stops to put this problem right.

They had

Unfortunaty we are still up in scotland, we went out on trials last weekend and we found that the new shaft that we had to have fitted was running hot. We were unable to cool it down by allowing water to flood the stern tube so this pointed to something more seriosly wrong, so we headed first to Peterhead then after an inspection by the engineers at macduff we thought it best to head up to the

I was lucky enough to be given a tour of Peterhead market today by my friend John Buchan (skipper of the Atlantic Challange) it was very impessive, 12 boats landed this morning with nearly 8000 boxes of fish betwen them. This is nothing unusual for peterhead to handle and there was probably more fish in that 1 day, than the whole southwest would see in a whole week. The infrastucture to deal with

The boat is still up at macduff, but she will be ready to go back down the slip wednesday or thursday. The new shaft went in on friday and then  they started to weld the new nozzel on into the archway, it had to be done once the new shaft was in place as the welders had to have the prop on the end so the welding was spot on, as the slightest bit of unalinement would result in the prop touching

It has been another busy week up here at macduff, the chippys have been down and completly redesigned the fishroom. One of the problems we had was that the boxes we use were smaller, than the one's that they used to use when the boat worked from Scotland, so the boxes never fitted tight into the hold space. So now with the shelves replaced with new one's the boxes now fit snugly in place

The shipyard and the paint gang have been busy in the last few days working on the boat. They have stripped off the old paint on the hull and have started to paint the top deck. The workers from the yard have taken off the old prop and nozzel, but when they removed the main drive shaft it was showing quite a bit of wear on the key way, so we have to have a new shaft made. the shaft as you can imagine

We arrived a little early yesterday morning, so we went into the broch (fraserbrough) to drop off some boxes that the tranquility had left behind in Newlyn. It was low tide when we got to the murray firth, so we were unable to enter macduuff, as you need at least 3hours of flood to enter the harbour due to our draft. So we headed for macduff in the afternoon and we were moored by 1600hrs,