Trawling for sole and rockfish from Morro Bay in California, Kyle Pemberton is no stranger to innovation. He’s using a pair of MarEco’s trawl doors, the first pair of these rotation-moulded doors made from plastic materials to go to a US customer.
‘My hobby is surfing with hydrofoils in the ocean and when I saw the shape and design of Atli’s doors I was intrigued,’ he said.
‘I reached out to him and said I was interested in buying a spare/improved set of doors. He asked what kind I use currently. I was unsure what they were so I sent him a picture. I got my current doors out of another fisherman’s backyard who didn’t like them and I just liked they way they looked.’
These turned out to be a set of doors Atli Jósafatsson designed in the mid-1990s, and based on his experience with these, Kyle ordered a pair of Pluto doors to replace the older 1.9 square metre steel doors.
‘So basically I was sold because of the coincidence and my knowledge of how foil sections work in water. I like the idea of plastic trawl doors because I have a wood boat built in ’72.’
He grew up fishing for Dungeness crab and trolling for chinook (king) salmon with his father and uncle. Looking for a more stable operating pattern, he switched to groundfish in 2009, on what was supposedly the last Scottish seiner still fishing in the US.
‘I worked on that boat for eight years and was the alternate skipper for four of those years, catching rockfish, and sole, petrale sole and sand dabs,’ he said.
He bought his current boat in 2017 – with the support of the Nature Conservancy – and started out trawling in Morro Bay for sole and rockfish.
‘I was catching lots of fish but the infrastructure and price were not good. I was making enough to just meet my loan payments. So I bought into crab and salmon fisheries and the California halibut trawl fishery, and started making more money,’ he said.
‘For the California trawl fishery, I make day trips, and deliver mostly that night. Fishing grounds are as close as one hour to four hours away from my port. The halibut trawl fishery is year-round but when the crab season starts I have to stop for six weeks to switch to crab pots.’
The trawl fishery is mainly on sandy ground, and although he hasn’t been using them for long, the MarEco doors quickly made an impression.
‘The Pluto doors are better in many different ways. Started in the suggested position and worked perfectly in less than 30m depth. I’ve been trying out different configurations of the tow points and been having success in calm conditions and no strong current. My old doors were rigged in a way where I didn’t get the spread I wanted, but the ease of towing was more important to me than spread,‘ he said.
‘There’s only a handful of boats left fishing this way and basically self-taught. Spread seems to be equal to previous the setup in calm conditions. I have work to dial them in but I am very hopeful they will be a great upgrade. Current feeling is on them is the same spread, 10% fuel savings, more maneuverability, and less tension on my trawl wires. I also think they’re more stable on the bottom, less likely to fall over, because of the way they carry the weight/center of mass.’
