The first scallops harvested from Norwegian waters for around thirty years have been caught by pioneering scallop catcher Arctic Pearl.
Arctic Pearl’s crew announced that they got the best present they could have hoped for on Christmas Eve, deep in the Barents Sea, when the first catches of picked scallops hit the deck.
‘It’s a significant piece of Norwegian fishing history,’ an Ava Ocean representative stated. ‘We’d like to thank everyone who cheered us on and supported us.’
Operated by Ava Ocean (formerly Tau Tech), the former offshore support vessel Arctic Pearl underwent an extensive refit at the Fiskerstrand yard before being handed over to its owners, complete with a sophisticated processing deck and an innovative, high-tech harvesting system that picks scallops from the seabed with minimal ground contact.
Scallop fishing with conventional dredges was prohibited in Norwegian waters in the 1980s, following a huge but short-lived boom in fishing effort that decimated stocks.
