Fishing in the Russian Far East presents plenty of challenges and Andrey Fatyanov, who skippers a freezer trawler owned by Interaros, the part of Russian Fishery Group, says that fishing life is never easy, but always interesting.
He has been fishing since the mid-1990s and has skippered several factory trawlers, currently the Borodino, recently uprated to a 200 tonne per day production capacity.
‘We have a modern processing factory on board. Given the yield from pollock, to ensure the factory works at full capacity, I need to catch 300-320 tonnes of fish per day,’ he said.
‘I can say for sure that in recent years in Russia the weather is becoming tougher, while the fish is getting smarter. More things we invent to better catch fish, more ways fish discover to not get caught,” Andrey Fatyanov stated, commenting that there are real climate changes observed in the Russian Far East, as the storms in the region have became ‘faster and harder’ over the past years.
‘They are coming quick, much quicker than before, and gather momentum rapidly. The winds are also getting very strong with higher waves. All in all, it sometimes turns into real hurricanes. In past, a really heavy storm occurred in the Sea of Okhotsk only once in three years, but now it happens every year and we ourselves have been affected in January,’ he said.
At the same time, because of the stronger storms there is less ice in the region, and in March this year Andrey Fatyanov and other skippers were catching fish in areas where at this time of the year catching had been completely impossible for the previous 17 years.
For the full interview with Andrey Fatyanov, take a look at the latest issue of Hook and Net.
