Capelin processing and frozen roe production began at HB Grandi’s Akranes factory yesterday when Venus docked with 900 tonnes on board. The capelin were caught in three shots off the Snæfellsnes peninsula the day before yesterday. There was no fishing yesterday due to bad weather.
Síldarvinnslan’s capelin roe season has also started at its Helguvík facility in co-operation with Reykjanesbær company Saltver, with landings by Vilhelm Thorsteinsson, Börkur and Beitir, while pelagic vessels Hákon and Bjarni Ólafsson have both landed to the company at its Neskaupstaður factory.
‘We have just sailed from Akranes and are heading back to Snæfellsnes where there a few of the boats are shooting on capelin,’ said Venus’s skipper Guðlaugur Jónsson, commenting that the rest of the season is impossible to predict as experience from past capelin seasons indicates that there are just a few days of fishing left.
The short capelin roe season takes place at the very end of the capelin migration around Iceland, and is always a tense time as the roe reach the right maturity for the vital Japanese market just as the fish are about to disappear from Icelandic waters, with the winter weather also playing a critical role to make the roe season a highly unpredictable one.
‘There isn’t much capelin to be seen in Faxaflói Bay. We had some good fishing for three days and then the weather closed in on us yesterday so we weren’t able to carry on. By then the capelin were in the shallows off Snæfellsnes and all the way east to Mýrar, but with the weather as bad as it was, there was no way to catch it,’ Guðlaugur Jónsson said.
HB Grandi’s other pelagic vessel, Víkingur is now off the north coast on its way to the fishing grounds off Snæfellsnes, and they are also looking out for any signs of capelin on the way. Skipper Albert Sveinsson expects to be on the fishing grounds off Snæfellsnes around midday today.
‘We finished our last trip around 30 nautical miles west of Akranes, but now the capelin are further north off Snæfellsnes. We’re hoping to be able to shoot the gear, but after that there’s a storm forecast and it’s impossible to predict how things will turn out,‘ he said.
