After seemingly endless spells of bad weather across northern Iceland since the beginning of the month, conditions were finally good enough for capelin fishing at the weekend. Lundey NS had 400 tonnes on board by early on Saturday morning and Ingunn AK had 140-150 tonnes at the same time.
Lundey’s catch was landed at Vopnafjördur yesterday and the ship is now on its way back to fishing grounds in the Denmark Strait to start fishing again tonight. Ingunn had around 400 tonnes last night and now has around 600 tonnes on board.
‘We are inside the Greenland EEZ, north of Hornbjarg and we took our fish in six shots. There are marks everywhere, but the capelin rises to 40 fathoms as night falls so that’s when we can get something in the purse seine. In daylight the fish drop away to 150 fathoms so all we can do is wait for dark again,’ said Róbert Axelsson, skipper on Ingunn, when we spoke to him during the present trip.
He said that the weather outlook is good and he hopes that the marks of capelin will start to become tighter over the next few days.
‘We had fine weather last night, but there was plenty of moonlight, which could explain why the fish didn’t rise higher in the water than they did,’ he said.
Ingunn started the capelin season on the 4th of November. To start with, a great deal of time went into searching for marks north of Iceland while the Denmark Strait was under drifting ice. By the time the ice finally consolidated, the weather was too rough for fishing and it stayed bad right up to last weekend.
‘We have had non-stop bad weather, but hopefully we’ll get a bit of a break now,’ Róbert Axelsson said
