Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

We landed our last trip on friday' s market, we were only away for 36hours and we had 80boxes of mixed fish which was good for the time. We spent the day on Friday cleaning the boat up and getting her ready for the long steam up to macduff, after a lnog day on Friday we went home for the night and we headed off at 11 o'clock on saturday morning.

We headed up the east coast as theforecast was giving the weather up and down with occasional gale's at times on the west coast, but the east coast was going to miss the worst of the weather.

We arrived at Dover on sunday evening after making good speed up the English channel. The dover straits is one of the busiest shipping lanes  in the world. the reason for this is that its a bottle-neck for all the vessels entering or leaving the north sea and the many european ports. When you are transitting the straits you have to follow the right shipping lane in a traffic seperation scheeme, which is just like being on a motorway but instead of trucks you have 200,000 tonne tankers passing you within 50 meters at times, which can be quite an experince. You also have to watch out for the many ferries which are crossing the traffic heading for the Brittish or French passenger ports.

After we had negotiated the straits we then set our coarse to head up towards the tip of east anglia, there are many banks in this area that are very shallow, so they must be avoided so a good watch was kept through the night as we steamed our way through. When we reached the tip of east Anglia, we then had it a bit easier as it is just a straight run up the north sea until we reach Fraserbrough then we head west into the murray firth, which is where macduff is situated.

We are deep off Edinbrough this afternoon and we are hoping to be at macduff by tomorrow morning if all goes well.