Icelandic leading harvester HB Grandi making good start of blue whiting fishery

Three of HB Grandi's pelagic vessels have started fishing on blue whiting and have made an excellent start to the season. Ingunn AK was first on the fishing grounds and is now on the way home with 1900 tonnes on board for two days fishing. There's a price to be paid for such good fishing as the grounds are west of Ireland, around 700 nautical miles from Iceland, reports http://www.megafishnet.com/ with reference to HB Grandi's release dated 15 March 2010. 

According to Vilhjálmur Vilhjálmsson, head of HB Grandi's pelagic division, Ingunn was able to start fishing at midnight last Friday. Faxi RE has now been there for a day and has 800 tonnes on board, while Lundey NS arrived this morning.

The company's vessels finished their capelin season last week when the 20,500 tonne quota they had between them had been caught. This was a short, sharp capelin season. The first catches were landed to Akranes on the 18th of February and Víkingur AK landed the final payload at Vopnafjördur on the 12th of March. All of the capelin landed went to roe separation and the roe was processed for markets in Japan and Eastern Europe.

The capelin season appears to be over now. There were hopes of a western migration of capelin, but Víkingur's crew were not aware of any capelin to be seen while they steamed the ship home to Akranes along the north and west coasts from Vopnafjördur.