Try not to order anything extra with your pizza’s or special deliveries from the taxi cabs?
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The 27-year-old Sisimiut has been sold to Iceland and is replaced with a new trawler of the same name. Image: Royal Greenland
I would expect a Factory trawler to stay at sea for a lot longer than that. (??)
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I guess we’re just better fishermen than you.
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first and last time I seasick I was 8 years old, cod fishing with my father. Remember it near 60 years later like it was yesterday. On the drive home I asked my Dad how much does cod fish cost anyway. Hope you get lucky and no issues on the trip.
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You must be if you manage to fill the freezer holds with fillets, the meal hold with fishmeal and the tanks with fish oil in less than a week.
PS> Don’t know if Surimi is still part of the products processed on board US Factory trawlers catching Pollock in the Bering Sea.(??)
I’m not a fisherman but IFAIK modern Factory trawlers usually spend 3-5 weeks on a trip to fish cod in the Barents Sea.
Yes, but they do have to offload. 
Just a wag, but 260’ trawler probably hols something around 800-1000 tons of product. When it’s really good, that would be about a week, maybe slightly more, but likely not much less. Hard to say really, but that’s why they call it fishing.
-K
It also depends on the capacity of the factory and the plate freezers. Sometimes catching has to stop to let the processing catch up.
A new trawler under construction at VARD the capacity of the fillet line will be approx. 60 tons frozen fish per day.
Source: https://optimar.no/blog/optimar-to-deliver-complete-factory-for-deutsche-fischfang-union-gmbh-co-kg-(dffu)
Ya,
Didn’t want to get into the weeds on this. It’s a midsize trawler, so it could be either a med/small Surimi/Pollock boat or a large bottom trawler H&G boat.
Freezer lock can certainly happen with either, but more common on the h&g boats. Hard to say really though without knowing which boat it is, just figured he didn’t post the name for a reason.
-K
Maybe we have a different understanding of what is a Factory Trawler.
In this part of the world that means a bottom trawler with onboard processing of fillet, fishmeal and oil. Of course they can also process H&G if that is what the market calls for.
Hey friends,
After a month of waiting for the client to decide on the days we’d travel to Dutch, and once pushing it to mid-March, now they’ve decided to put it off until summer. The main reason is much better weather, they said. I get it, they’re spending a good amount of money on a 3-person crew to fly us from Seattle and take care of us for a week. While I am disappointed that I won’t get to experience the Bering Sea in winter, bad weather wouldn’t make my work any easier. I am doing photography on the boat, plus flying a drone, and flying a drone and attempting to land it on a boat is a nightmare even in perfect weather.
I can’t thank you all enough for the invaluable information you shared with me. And as I promised earlier, if I make it up there and back, I will share some of that work with you here. And I’ll probably share the name of the boat then
You likely already know this but for those that don’t:
Flying a drone from even a stationary steel boat tied to a dock has problems. Anyone new to trying it would best practice launching and recovering several times before planning on filming. The compass and sensors weren’t developed with large steel masses in mind.
One of our drone photographers routinely disables the magnetic compass on his drones because the steel in the boat causes the compass(and therefore drone) to go cattywampus when it gets within a few yards of the deck. With the compass enabled the drone get within a few yards of landing then suddenly veer off, or does the same on a deck take-off.
Even launching from a wood dock with a big steel crane near you can cause the drone to go crazy.
The drone’s other sensors don’t like all the rigging etc. around a boat’s deck, making for lots of crashed landings until you anticipate the danger.
When launching from a moving boat, on more than one occasion our drone would fly a few tens of yards then freeze in midair , requiring the boat to circle around back under it in order to recover it.
Dont be surprised if the the altimeter is reading higher than the drone actually is, when flying over water. Why this happens we don’t know. Only a problem if you are flying close to the surface (6 feet or so).
Keep in mind a boat at sea is always moving. If you launch from a moving boat you have to be careful to keep the mass of the boat from interfering with your radio signal. On a sunny day you might find yourself with a glare problem viewing your screen, because the way the boat turned. Seems like a little thing, until you can’t see the screen.
Suggest lots of practice. We have a drone photographer on one of our boats now, doing a job. Started with three drones. Down to two now…
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All of that is very true. I’ve talked to some people who’ve flown them from smaller pleasure vessels, but no one who’s flown them from a large fishing boat. It’s hard to pull off. Taking off not so much, but landing is hard, with drones crashing onto the boat or ending up in the water. Most successful landings (of smaller drones) are hand caught, and that sometimes ends up with big and deep cuts. Kevlar gloves are recommended ;-). Unfortunately this is difficult to practice in advance.
Do you mind me asking how big a boat the drone photographer you mentioned is on right now?
And, this is a big favor I’m asking of you; if you have the ability to get in touch with that photographer, would you ask him if he’d feel comfortable with you sharing his email address? I’d like to pick his brain about his experience.
Thank you!!!
The boat is 240 feet. I’ll contact you later today.
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There are a number of ways to avoid the guidance interference issue but the simplest one is a homing beacon on a pole/boathook.
For landing get a big fishing net handle, like for landing sportfish. Bring a carton of smokes and some C4 or Bangs for the deck crew and they will be happy to run you up a 7-8 foot long tunnel of large mesh poly webbing.
Attach a pole to a rib line about 4 feet from the opening. Bring the drone close to the beacon on a pole held away from the ships side, then bring the net up in between them and move the beacon pole back and kill power.
Much safer and less likely to damage equipment. Attach a line to the beacon pole and net pole in case they get dropped.
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Some of the larger trawlers are 1500-2000 tons and they still can fill up in 7 days, especially if fishing is close to harbor.
long line vessels for cod spend weeks at sea in Bering Sea, simply a slower, probably more sustainable process. The trawlers for pollock do 200-300+ tons a day of fillets, fishmeal, fishoil. surimii, etc, mostly fillets but they all add to the total.
Cod can be caught as by-catch but we do not have dedicated trawlers for Cod (black cod or pacific cod)
Yes I know that there were some enormous hauls done by the early Factory Trawlers in the Bering Sea and that they frequently had to stop catching to let the processing catch up.
There is a story from one of the early trips when a young Trawl Foreman named Kjell-Inge Røkke volunteered to run out on a overfilled trawl net to cut it open since it could not be pull onboard.
Don’t know if it was this trawler, but the right person:
PS> Second picture is from when he had registered as a fisherman again, catching prawns in the Oslofjord and selling them newly cooked at the wharf near Oslo City Hall:
