Faroese fishing gear manufacturer Vónin has made an entrance to the trawl door business with pelagic and demersal models that were introduced at the company’s Vónin Day at the Nordic House in Tórshavn with a hundred and fifty vessel owners, skippers, mates and deck bosses present.
Vónin has decided to produce its own trawl doors, giving it the opportunity to supply complete fishing gear packages.
Two trawl door designs have been developed with a Danish technical partner, based on extensive computer simulation and flume tank testing. The demersal/semi-pelagic Storm doors are now at sea with Royal Greenland’s trawler Akamalik.
Akamalik collected a full set of shrimp gear, including the new Storm doors before sailing for a shrimp trip in the Barents Sea, and early feedback two weeks into the trip is positive as the doors are easily spreading the twin trawls.
‘We have been busy with shrimp trawls for the Barents Sea, including gear for Russian and Norwegian trawlers, as well as full package of new gear for Akamalik,’ Vónin’s Bogi Nón said.
‘They took the new doors and a pair of new 3600 mesh trawls before they sailed, and they are seeing some excellent spread. There are a few minor alterations we will have to make based on the reports from Akamalik, but the doors are performing very well.’
As well as the Storm semi-pelagic/demersal doors, Vónin’s new pelagic doors are also in development, being prepared for their first full-scale trials within a few weeks.
The Tornado pelagic doors are covered by patents on the technology used to generate lift – which has also produced some outstandingly good CL/CD figures during tank tests.
‘The CL/CD figures we saw for these doors in the testing tank were the highest we have seen for any trawl doors available on the market,’ Bogi Nón said.
‘What we have been able to achieve with the Tornado design is that they can be towed at a very high angle of attack,’ he said.
‘A lot of trawl doors stall when they reach a high angle but that doesn’t happen with the Tornados. We tested them in the tank up to a 50° angle, and although we could see the graph starting to bottom out at that exceptionally high angle, it seems we could certainly take them further than that.’
The Tornado doors look highly promising. A 14 square metre pair of doors from another leading manufacturer gave Vónin’s 2304 pelagic trawl a 199 metre spread, a figure exceeded by a 12 square metre pair of Tornados, and a 14 square metre pair of Tornado doors pushed the spread all the way up to 238 metres.
