Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

We have been picking away quite nicely the last few weeks, the weather has been up and down but it hasn't stopped us , only for a day last week when we had a full gale from the south.

 But as usual with fishing, things never run smoothly, we finished a 6day trip on thursday evening and turned the boat around and was ready to sail again within a couple of hours.

Alec had the boat away and I had a trip off, they just got settled into a trip after 24hours of good fishing, when all of a sudden the steering alarm rang off and we lost all the power steering.

Without the power steering it is very difficult to control the vessel whilst we are towing the trawls. Luckily we have a back up manual system that is connected directly to the rudder, so we were able to haul the gear and made for home using the old ships wheel that sits in the centre of the wheelhouse.(its not just for show).

The boat arrived back in Newlyn in the early hours of saturday morning, so we took the steering pump off and headed up to Brixham to hercules hydrolics, so they could asses the damage. The shaft inside the pump had wore bad and the support bearing had collapsed, and the parts we needed were up in sheffeild.

We have been busy since we left Tom's boatyard over 2weeks ago, the weather has been good and we have been able to put a few trips together.

 We got off to a good start with 2 good trips off in the deeper water to the southwest of the scillies, there has been a good run of haddocks on the grounds as well as some lovely sized megs and monks to go with it.

The area we are working goes down to 75 fathom which is 15fathom deeper than our usual grounds, you start to see deeper water species below 65fathom and we have had a few ourselves. We are seeing the odd greater forbeard(scoth hake as they have a tarten look to their skin) and we also had a six gilled shark.

We arrived back to Newlyn in the early hours of saturday morning after our 2week re-fit at Tom's yard in Polruan near Fowey.

We were lucky with the weather, which was a great help as we  managed to get the boat well painted up. We have also had a good re-fit with quite a bit of work being done around the boat.

The men at the shipyard had been kept busy and pulled out all the stops to get us ready in time to come down the slip on friday afternoon. We have had a crab tank fitted, two new seacocks, lots of welding work, caulking of the seems and butts around the hull, new sheaving on the starboard side, new hydrolic levers for the crane and pipes, a new flat screen tv with a built in cuboard and much more.

As usual Alan and Paul Tom's were really helpful and made sure all the work was done in time, so many thanks to them and the men at the yard. Also to paul our engineer who gave the engine a good service and to flossy who put up quite a few new lights about the boat, also John of fowey fluid power who overhauled the crane.

We always enjoy our stay at the yard as it is a very attractive place to visit, you would never beleive a yard was down there but they do a lot of work at Tom's re-fitting most of the boats in the southwest. But after two weeks of painting we will be glad to get back to sea and catch some fish.

The boat arrived back into Newlyn late tuesday afternoon after a six day trip to the southwest of the scillies. We landed our catch into the lorry for sale on the wednesday's market at Plymouth.

This was the last landing for nearly 3 weeks as we were due up to Tom's boatyard on the Friday morning for our annual refit and paint up, but before we headed up to Polruan we had a lot to do to get the boat ready.

We had to take the nets off and put them on the quay to be repaired, then we gave the boat a really good clean and we had to jet spray all the surfaces off, ready for painting. This took most of wednesday and thursday to do, but by thursday afternoon we were ready so we went home for tea, then came back in to leave in the early hours to catch the tide right to head around the lizard.

I have had a busy week again, we landed last wednesday after a short trip to the grounds off to the southerd. The fishing wasn't to bad but the fish were flighty and moving across the ground quick, which made trying to stop in the best place to fish difficult.

We had quite a bit of work to do on the gear the evening we landing, we had the nets to mend some routine engine jobs and 4splices to put in on our sweeps, which proved to be good practice for later in the week, as I shall explain in a bit.

pictures courtesy of Dave Linkie fishing news

The boat sailed again in the early hours of wednesday morning and as the fishing had been slack on the near grounds, Alec decided to head further to the southwest, to a new piece of ground that we have never fished. This was something we were planning to do after the refit that we are having next week, but with a fine week forecaste Alec took the bull by the horns so to speak and went for it.