Good fishing, fine mackerel

HB Grandi’s pelagic vessel Víkingur is in port in Vopnafjörður after completing its trip with 770 tonnes on board.
According to skipper Albert Sveinsson, fishing has been mainly good over the last few weeks, despite difficulties in some areas where the mackerel have been mixed with herring – as nobody wants to be catching herring until the mackerel season is over.
‘We were fishing off the Reyðarfjörður Deeps, and that’s around eight hours’ steaming to Vopnafjörður. It hasn’t been easy to avoid getting some herring as by-catch, and this happens every year that there’s some herring with the mackerel. You just have to move on and hope to get clean mackerel somewhere else,’ he said, and commented that the mackerel appear to be moving fast towards the north-east.
‘There was some very good fishing over the Bank Holiday weekend, mostly in the Little Deeps and the the Hvalbakur Bank. Now the mackerel are further north and I hear that some of the pelagic boats have been fishing off Vopnafjörður. This is all fine fish, 500 grammes and over, and it doesn’t look like the shorewards migration is slowing down.’
Albert Sveinsson said that there is a considerable volume of mackerel off western Iceland, although the pelagic fleet has not been fishing there.
‘Two of the trawlers from Grindavík have been fishing for mackerel off the west, but one of them is now here off the east coast. So the fishing off the west may have slowed down,’ he said.