Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

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 withthese huge volumes of fish is equally as impressive with many people employed right acroos the north east corner of Scotland just handling the catches that arrive in Peterhead and the Broch.

After the market tour we went to see the smokehouse at the caley which can smoke up to four and half tonnes of fillets a day, mainly coley.

Then we both had a tour of John's pal's boat, the Quantos, she is a 71meter palagic trawler only 1year old, everthing about these vessels is impressive, just from the size of the winches, with the warp being as thick as my wrist to the imaculate accomadation. I was blown away by the scale of this ship and the sophistacted equipment that she used to catch her fish, this is

fishing on a huge scale and with the vessel able to carry around 1600tonnes of fish and to have 500-1000 tonne hauls, beleive me the equipment has to be huge to handle that weight of fish.

                   Quantos in Peterhead discharging herring.

She was in Peterhead discharging just over 1000tonnes of herring, they also fish for blue whitting and mackerall. The fishery that they are involved in is well run and the stocks are well managed even though they catch large volumes the stocks are very healthy. For me this was a great day out!