Redfish and haddock quotas exhausted

‘There’s crazy weather right now and the forecast for the Westfjords doesn’t look good. It’s NNEasterly, which means there’s no shelter to be found. I’m making use of the bad weather to push northwards. Our main hopes are that we can find some cod or saithe on the Thverálshorn or Djúpkrókur grounds without any redfish getting on our way,’ said Heimir Guðbjörnsson, skipper of fresher trawler Helga María.

When we caught up with him, he had just left the Nes Deeps behind. Catch rates were around a tonne per hour of mainly cod. He said that catches had dropped considerably, as when they had been there a few days earlier, fishing had still been fairly decent.

‘We sailed from Reykjavík at midday on Wednesday and the catch for the last trip had been around 135 tonnes. Then we ended up in the Nes Deeps after having been on the Thverálshorn and Hali grounds. There was some saithe with the cod around the Thverálshorn, but on the Hali grounds we were getting far too much redfish with the saithe catches,’ he said, adding that with the quota year coming to an end, things are tight.

‘Quotas for redfish and haddock are exhausted. The situation has been mapped pretty well. Further east on the Strandagrunn some of the north coast trawlers have been getting mostly haddock and the same goes for the lava grounds in the Kolbeinsey area. We’re pinning our hopes on the Thverálshorn area and the shallow grounds to the west of the southern Westfjords. There can always be a sudden showing of fish here or there and it’s important to not be too far away,’ Heimir Guðbjörnsson said.

Helga María is due to dock in Reykjavík on Tuesday, and is expected to manage one more trip before the end of this quota year.