Built for Ålesund company Atlantic Seafish, there’s a lot of technology packed into the 43.50-metre, 11.50-metre breadth Polarbris, rigged for trawling, seine netting and crabbing.
The company was set up in 1997 by the imaginative partnership of Kjell-Gunnar Hoddevik and partners Johnny Årvik and Jan-Ove Langeland, who have been fishing since 2020 with Atlantic, a highly innovative combination of seine netter and longliner – as they were among the first to take advantage of changes in legislation that made this combination of gear types possible.
The freshly-delivered Polarbris is an addition to the company’s fleet and has been designed and built by Karstensens Skibsværft, and has now been delivered following something of a delay due to the turmoil triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as late deliveries by suppliers.
Polarbris is laid out for seine netting for groundfish with a deck machinery package supplied by Norwegian company Evotec, with a pair of MultiSoft Flyshoot winches on the main deck and two pairs of 15.50-tonnes net drums, one pair amidships and the other over the stern.
There are tanks on board for live fish, and Polarbris has a C-Flow vacuum pump system with a 4200-litre tank for handling live groundfish catches.
Three Evotec 22-tonne trawl winches are arranged at boat deck level, and provide options for twin-ring trawling for shrimp or whitefish. Evotec also supplied the unloading and anchor winches. Cranes are a 1300XL unit forward and a SeaQuest net roller crane with an 4-tonne capacity mounted on the aft gantry with and an 11-metre reach.
Catches are handled on the SteelTech factory deck, outfitted with Baader heading machines and KM Fish Machinery gutting machines. Marelec supplied the sorting and weighing system on board. The four vertical freezers are from DSI and Polarbris has Teknotherm refrigeration and RSW plants.
Carsoe supplied Polarbris’s crab handling production line. Catches are stored in the 470 cubic metre refrigerated fishroom.
The main engine is a 1370kW Yanmar 6EY22AW, powering a 3900mm Brunvoll Volda CP68 propeller via a two-step Brunvoll Volda CPACG68/600 reduction gear. An 890klWe Cummins HCM 634 k2 shaft generator is mounted in the main gear’s PTO, and this serves as the primary power source on board, backed up by a 600kWe Nogva Scania DI16 generator. This is supplemented by a 600kWh Corvus Orca battery pack, and Polarbris has a Power Management System which manages power consumption and automatic start-up of the generator system as well as control of the battery pack.
In addition, Polarbris has a 500kW AR63 submersible thruster from Brunvoll, who also supplied the 190kW aft side thrusters.
The wheelhouse is fitted out with a package of electronics supplied by Florvaag and installed by KS Elektro. The skipper’s control position faces a bank of eight 43-inch Hatteland monitors with display managed via a Florvaag FMCS selector system. A further fifteen 27-inch monitors are installed around the wheelhouse, overhead and at the after wheelhouse winch control position.
The main fishfinders are a Simrad SN90 multibeam sonar and an ES80 sounder, while the navigation systems are a pair of Tecdis T-2138A ECDIS systems, a MaxSea Time Zero plotter and an Olex 3D system. The radars are from Furuno, as are the CO68 log, SC70 GPS compass, GP170 GPS navigator and FA170 AIS. Autopilots are Simrad AP70 units.
VHF sets are from Sailor and the satellite communications package is from Starlink, plus Polarbris has an Iridium LT-3199 satellite phone. The Sat-TV system is from Intelian.
