Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

What a trip this week turned out to be, we started the trip last tuesday and to start with we found the fishing up and down but generally slack. Then on saturday we had the first cut in the tide and the fishing went mental, I have never seen so much fish on the grouds, when we hauled our net on saturday afternoon the bag was full that we had a job to heave it aboard via our bag hatch, so we dropped the net to the stern where we were able to use the main winch to heave it over the rail. we had a nice bit of white fish but we also had 2tonnes of smooth hounds which is quite unusual to see so many.

So thinking that this was a one off we shot our net again, we towed for another 4 hours, then when we hauled, as we got the net to the surface we saw that the cod end was full to bursting, so there was no way we were going to heave the net in the bag hatch. So we once again we took the net to the stern, but this time the weight of fish was even greater, we used the winch to heave the monster bag over the stern but we had a job to guide it over the rail, so we used our crane to do this, but unfortunatly the weight was so great that we ended up blowing our hydrollic pipes on the crane. We got the monster bag aboard but unfortunatly we had to head back to Newlyn as we didn't have enough pipes or fittings to fix the crane.      

With this being saturday night we were stumped as we thought we had no chance to get anyone to fix the crane on a sunday, but luckily our dad came in and phoned doug from R&D engineering and he said he would come down. Doug had us fixed up again in a couple of hours, so we were able to head back out to sea to finish our trip. We were very greatful to Doug in helping us out that early on a sunday, so he headed up the quay with a bag of fish. We landed our catch last night and it was sold this morning at PTA, the prices weren't great but Mark the auctioneer did a good job in getting a reasonable price for the smooth hounds even though we had more than 5tonnes in totall. The weather is looking poor for a couple of days, so we are glad to stop after 3weeks non stop we have plenty of jobs to do.