‘It’s very quiet and there is much less pearlside than there was at this time last year. There are more boats fishing and the area we are fishing on isn’t big, so it’s not easy,’ said skipper Albert Sveinsson of Faxi RE when we asked him about progress on pearlside so far.
Faxi arrived on the Grindavík Deeps grounds yesterday morning after steaming from Akranes, where they landed 490 tonnes on Saturday. On the same day, Bjarni Ólafsson AK landed 435 tonnes and Ingunn AK was in port with 520 tonnes of pearlside.
All three of HB Grandi’s pelagic vessels are now on pearlside in the Grindavík Deeps after Ingunn and Lundey NS also sailed on Sunday.
‘The boats from the Westmann Islands and Hornafjördur have been searching for pearlside further east without seeing anything. So the whole fleet is now in the Grindavík Deeps, where there are now ten pelagic vessels fishing on pearlside There doesn’t seem to be a large amount there. We’re mostly seeing marks in 120 to 130 fathoms and sometimes higher. Normally we tow from eight or nine in the morning for around twelve hours before we haul the gear. There’s very little by-catch and in the last trip we had three small tubs of other fish in five days’ fishing,’ Albert Sveinsson said.
