Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

We have been picking away quite nicely the last few weeks, the weather has been up and down but it hasn't stopped us , only for a day last week when we had a full gale from the south.

 But as usual with fishing, things never run smoothly, we finished a 6day trip on thursday evening and turned the boat around and was ready to sail again within a couple of hours.

Alec had the boat away and I had a trip off, they just got settled into a trip after 24hours of good fishing, when all of a sudden the steering alarm rang off and we lost all the power steering.

Without the power steering it is very difficult to control the vessel whilst we are towing the trawls. Luckily we have a back up manual system that is connected directly to the rudder, so we were able to haul the gear and made for home using the old ships wheel that sits in the centre of the wheelhouse.(its not just for show).

The boat arrived back in Newlyn in the early hours of saturday morning, so we took the steering pump off and headed up to Brixham to hercules hydrolics, so they could asses the damage. The shaft inside the pump had wore bad and the support bearing had collapsed, and the parts we needed were up in sheffeild.

So we have had to tie up for the weekend and wait for the parts to arrive, we spoke to the firm this morning and they have promised us that the parts will arrive later today, so hopefully we will be able to sail this evening f all goes well.