Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

With the arrival of summer we are starting to see large numbers of Basking sharks, we pass these huge beasts on our way to and from Newlyn. They like to sit in the tidal currents especially around Gwennap Head, near Porthcurno, at high tide they can be seen sifting the waters off Lamorna and Mousehole. They don't cause us any trouble nor do we seem to bother them, but the food that they areafter can cause problems for our fridges! The plankton, or glit as we like to call it, gets into our coolers and we can usually tell when it needs cleaning out as the hold temperature starts to rise, so we and I'm sure many other fishermen have been busy these last couple of weeks cleaning them out trying to keep our cool!

The fishing has still been slack and especially so this last week, it's quite normal for this time of year and usually picks up again towards the end of June. This is why we normally lay up at this time of year for 3 weeks to have our annual re-fit. However this year we were due up to MacDuff to fit a new nozzel, but this has been delayed until the end of July due to the designers in this country, Kort, outsourcing the manufacturing to Mexico, what with the problems out there this year it has been delayed by a few weeks. This has been very frustrating especially now as the fishing  is so  slack.