With Ingunn AK and Lundey NS already on their way south to start fishing, HB Grandi’s fishmeal production facility at Akranes is now busy landing fish from Faxi RE, which docked this morning after a long and difficult trip through bad weather from fishing grounds deep west of Ireland.
‘We’re really busy right now,’ said factory manager Gudmundur Hannesson when we spoke to him earlier today. He reported that Ingunn’s catch had come to 1380 tonnes, while Lundey had discharged 1225 tonnes when they docked at the end of last week. The estimated 1300 to 1400 tonnes that Faxi has on board brings the blue whiting landings up to 4000 tonnes, which will keep the factory busy up to the end of the week.
‘We can run 900 to 1000 tonnes of raw material through every 24 hours, but as there’s a high liquid content, we prefer to run things slower at around 600 to 700 tonnes every 24 hours so that the usage is better,’ he said and commented that the blue whiting landed so far is big fish of good quality.
The fishing grounds are between 48 and 60 hours steaming, so that under good conditions four days of each trip are spent steaming to and from fishing grounds. Catches have been respectable when there have been breaks in the weather, but bad weather has made fishing difficult for the whole of the last week.
