Quiet fishing grounds

‘It’s obvious that there isn’t much of this quota year left. In the whole of the last trip, we saw two other trawlers and that means that quotas for particular species have been used up,’ said Jóhannes Ellert Eiríksson, skipper of Brim’s fresher trawler Viðey.

Viðey was alongside at the beginning of this week to discharge 150 tonnes of fish, of which 40 tonnes were saithe. The focus for the crew is now to catch as much saithe as possible – and that can be a challenge as saithe often swim with redfish or cod on the fishing grounds.

‘This time we started fishing on the Mountains, and then moved to the shallows off Patreksfjörður. We found cod and saithe there, and without any haddock to make life difficult for us. We finished up to the north on the Hali grounds and all the main species are there; cod, redfish, saithe and haddock.’

He said that he hasn’t heard any reports of fishing recently in the Víkuráll Gully, presumably because fishing there is all redfish, or because of how few fishing vessels are at sea now. When we caught up with him, Jóhannes Ellert was steaming back to fishing grounds.

‘We’re going straight back to the Hali grounds. I’m not expecting the weather to be as kind to us as it was during the last trip, as there’s some rough weather forecast but hopefully nothing too heavy,’ Jóhannes Ellert Eiríksson said.