‘Our core products are wire, combination rope and netting,’ Albert Hartman said, commenting that fishing hardware is at the heart of what Visserij Coöperatie Urk (VCU) does.
The combination rope for seine netting is where there has been significant growth, and he said that in 2009 VCU delivered 20,000 metres of seine rope.
‘By September this year we had already delivered 200,000 metres,’ he said.
‘We’re looking for a high breaking strength, and then there is the problem of short coils. Every skipper will tell you that the splices are the weak points, so we needed to source long lengths of seine rope and now we can get as much as 3500 metres of 44m rope in a single length,’ he said. The length depends on the diameter, and a slightly larger rope means a shorter length, so 50mm rope can come in a 3200 metre length.
With sizes like this, handling is no simple matter and VCU has invested in forklifts and trucks so that these large reels can be handled, delivering rope directly to the quayside to be spooled on board as deliveries are made as far from home as France and Denmark.
He commented that part of the seine rope service is recycling and a wake-up call a few years ago prompted him to set this up as part of the package.
‘I saw a boat that had picked up some seine rope in its propeller and there was a lot of damage, with the propeller going one way and the gearbox the other so they had a major repair job. The rope had been discarded at sea and I had an idea who had done it,’ he commented.
‘So we set up a recycling service, and this is included in the price of the rope. The rope and the steel content are separated, so everything is recycled.’
For the full story, see the latest edition of Hook and Net.
