Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

We sailed early last saturday morning and with a huge spring tide due over the next few days, we headed away off to the southwest so that we could get out of the strongest of the tide.

The fishing started off not to bad, but as we had just put new warps aboard,  I thought that the fishing was down a little. With new warp being very greasy when it first goes on the winch, it can cause extra drag in the water as the grease goes fluffy to look at on the wire and it acts as if the warp is twice as thick in the water. This can cause extra drag which means that the trawl doors are not able to achieve the spread that we need, so consequentely our nets are not open to what they should be.

This is quite the norm with new warps and I tried to compansate for this by lengthening the amount of warp that we shot, it did help but not enough. After a couple of days the grease bedded into the warp and the spread started to increase again and by the third day the spread and the fishing was back to normal.

The weather turned poor on the monday and the fish slacked off to the west as the tide reached its peak. So we steamed east by a dozen miles and got back into the fishing again and we started to catch a few cuttles in amoungst the catch. The last couple of days were the best of the trip and we started to see a nice few haddocks with a good mix of megs, monk, squid and gurnards each haul.

The tide started to cut on tuesday and this probably helped the fishing, on monday at the height of the tide it was flowing like a river with 1.5knots of tide behind us and this was in an area where we go to get out of the tide. When the tide is flowing hard I am often suprised that we catch anything at all as its hard to imagine the fish being able to stop near the seabed.

We arrived back into Newlyn on thursday morning to land and take on ice, fuel, and stores, so we should be ready to sail again tonight