Royal Greenland’s brand new trawler Avataq, designed by Skipsteknisk and built at the Murueta shipyard in Spain, stopped in the Faroe Islands before heading for Greenland.
Designed to focus on shrimp in Greenlandic waters and the Barents Sea, Avataq is the second new Royal Greenland trawler delivered in 2019, following filleter Sisimiut which was delivered in the spring and for which Vónin also delivered fishing gear.
We spoke to skipper Jógvan Tróndarson before heading to Nuuk in the New Year. Before taking over the new triple-rigger, he had been skipper of Akamalik and is no stranger to Vónin gear.
‘We have the full package from Vónin,’ he said.
‘This is almost standard gear, but because we have the possibility to tow three trawls, the gear is a little different. On Akamalik we use two 3900 mesh trawls, but to tow three trawls we have gone down to 3400 meshes instead,’ he said.
‘We have never done this before, so we decided to start low and we can increase the size of the trawls later if we need to. But we have to be able to crawl before we try to walk.’
The full package of fishing gear has been supplied by Vónin, including 15 and 16 square metre pairs of Vónin’s Storm trawl doors.
‘We’ll start with the 16 square metre doors, and then try the 15 metre doors to see if we can save some fuel.’
Avataq will be fishing with 3400 mesh Vónin 2014 shrimp trawls, a tried and tested design that is widely used across the North Atlantic. Vónin supplied four trawls rigged on rockhopper and complete with codends and sorting grids, as well as providing four sets of warps, a full inventory of deck gear, hardware and spare parts.
Jógvan Tróndarson commented that Avataq uses virtually the same gear in both Greenland and Barents Sea waters, the differences lying the codend mesh size requirements for each area, and for grids with different bar spacing to comply with the Norwegian regulations in the Barents Sea.
