Brim’s fresher trawler Viðey landed this week after a tough trip that took it to Westfjords grounds, and finishing up off the south-west of Iceland – with the whole trip spent avoiding the golden redfish that is could become a choke species for the groundfish fleet.
‘There’s a colossal amount of golden redfish everywhere and I don’t want to even think about where we would be now of we hadn’t been super-cautious,’ said skipper Kristján E. Gíslason, best known as Kiddó.
The catch was 110 tonnes, the bulk of which was caught during the last day of the trip on the Eldey Bank.
‘If anything, I would have preferred to have shifted southwards a day earlier,’ he said, commenting that the trip started on Westfjords grounds.
‘There was nothing to be had there but wind. No fish, just wind and plenty of it. We started in the Víkuráll Gully. There had been a three-day showing of cod there, but that was over by the time we arrived. There was a huge volume of golden redfish everywhere in the Víkuráll Gully and the only way to fish there is to avoid redfish,’ he said.
From the Víkuráll Gully Viðey shifted north the Thveráll area, where there was much the same story: heavy weather and no cod or saithe.
‘It’s tempting to think that the cod that had been seen in the Víkuráll Gully is part of a migration from the west, in this case from the Dohrn Bank. This is typical spawning cod, four to six kilo fish,’ he said. This opinion is echoed by Brim’s experienced skippers, as has been mentioned here before.
Viðey finished its trip on the Eldey Bank.
‘We were fishing alone most of the time. We had some decent cod and a scattering of large seasonal saithe. I’d give it three weeks until they start to show properly. The middle of March is when they tend to turn up.’
It goes without saying that there’s also golden redfish across southern grounds.
‘If we weren’t careful we wouldn’t be able to tow for an hour without coming to grief,’ Kristján E. Gíslason said.
