BLUE WHITING SEASON UNDERWAY

Blue whiting season underway with good catches reported. The NE Atlantic blue whiting season is underway, and Iceland’s HB Grandi’s pelagic vessel Venus arrived in Vopnafjörður earlier this week with the first catch of the year. The fish were caught west of Ireland, making it an 800 nautical mile steam home, taking approximately three days.

Skipper Guðlaugur Jónsson  said: ‘There’s fishing there at the moment. The best fishing is overnight, and during the day the blue whiting are dispersed to there isn’t much fishing then. The length of tow varies, depending on the catch rate and the weather. Conditions have been changeable and there was bad weather for the last 24 hours. The weather there was fine when we left, but there’s no way to tell how long it will last.’

He estimated the catch was 2600 to 2700 tonnes for four days on the fishing grounds and that there is a large number of vessels fishing at the moment for blue whiting.

‘We were lucky in that we didn’t have to wait to get started. Things are crowded down there, but we were able to start fishing as soon as we arrived on the fishing grounds on Monday last week,’ Guðlaugur Jónsson said.