Five twin-rig fishing trawlers from Scotland- the Lead Us FR 938, Lindisfarne INS 51, Coromandel KY 27, Suilven IV BCK 366 and Shekinah 111 FR 34 left Fraserburgh Harbour in the North East of Scotland last week for the last time to steam to Ghent in Belgium where they will be dismantled and broken up by Van Heyghen Recycling.
The Five wooden hulled trawlers which range in size from 16.7 metres to 22.9 metres and have combined aged of 127 years were all constructed between the years of 1984-1987 at some of Scotland’s top boat builders including the Famous James N. Miller Yard at St. Monans, Fife. Gerrards Yard in Arbroath, and MacDuff Boat building Yard at MacDuff
The trawlers are five of the original 41 Scottish trawlers offered fleet resilience grants, in September totalling around £8.2 million by Marine Scotland as part of the Licence Parking Scheme.
Another six trawlers originally on a reserve list of 12 have recently been transferred to the main tier and offered grants that became available as a result of some skippers opting to keep there trawlers and continue fishing.
Most of the boats have been offered grants in the region of £200,000. Bids could exceed 100% of the hull and other parts including machinery insurance value of the donor trawler as at 1st of January this year up to a maximum of £250.000.
12 of the trawlers expected to be removed from the Scottish fleet are based in Fraserburgh, six at Peterhead based which are also scheduled to be scrapped. Shortly.
The others come from Pittenweem in Fife, Buckie, Eyemouth, Shetland, Ullapool, Campbeltown, and Mallaig.
The Licence Parking Scheme enables a owner vessel./vessels to use the entitlement of KW fishing days and quota purchasing and transferred from another trawler without aggregating the kW and GT capacity of the licences.
Skippers who do accept the grant will have to March 31 next year (2011) to scrap their trawlers and surrender the licences.
Marine Scotland will then issue a parking entitlement to each of the recipient trawler confirming the kW capacity basis for the calculation of the donor trawler’s days at sea allocation, which will be available for transfer annually to the recipient trawler.
