Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

We sailed last friday and headed back out to the grounds to the south of the scillies, the fishing wasn't that great but what we were catching was prime fish.

We had extra work to do this week, we were asked to do some discard trials this week by Dr Tom catchpole, who works for CEFAS, which is the fishiery science body for the UK.

We work two nets which is a method known as twinrigging, the best thing about the project that CEFAS have set up, is that it is in partnership with us the fisherman and we are being asked about the best ways to reduce our discard rate. This is a really good approach and we are designing nets that can help to combat this problem and we are getting finacial help with this from CEFAS itself.

We chose to trial a larger mesh stocking and codend on one of the trawls to see if this would reduce the discards and not cause to much of a financial loss. So far so good after the last trip at sea things are looking good with not to much of a finacial loss but a reduction in the discards, which  is a great start. With having two trawls this makes the compairing very easy and we did this every haul for five days and we weighed the two catches and the discards each haul so we had an accurate count each haul, so by theend of the week we could start to see some intresting trends emerging.

This information will be sent back to Tom at CEFAS in lowestoft for further analysis, other fisherman are also doing the trial this year as well with differing solutions to the problems so it will be intresting what the outcome wil be.

Trawling down here in the southwest does not have a high discard rate, it is well under 10% and the discard does not contain marketable pressure stocks, but any reduction in the discards is welcomed by the fiherman and we are glad to be part of the project.

We finished our trip last night and the boat sailed again,Alec has the boat away this trip and the scientist are onboard again continuing the trials.