Eight hauls bagged

Today, on board Vizconde de Eza we have only left a last CTD to round off a very good working day - despite the weather.

As we hauled the fourth haul we had a vicious wind reaching 40 knots, and in such wind and waves the deckhands had to bring our gear on board. It was a tail of the low that thankfully crossed over very quickly but with very bad timing. We got a video but you will have to wait for us to come to land to see it. Do not complain though, at least this year we can show plenty of pictures!

As you can see we have spend the day in what we call “the beach”, or all that huge extension on the Grand Bank where depth does not reach even 100 m. We plan to do the same tomorrow, a bit further south, but the same depth, where working conditions will be better.

We have also cast the CTD three times and right now we are on the way to take the fourth and last. A long day for Eva.

Many of you know a lot about our work, but for the benefit of the new readers we will go through it with lots of pics.

The gear comes on board from the stern, where deckhands fold it carefully with a crane, in a way that facilitates casting it next time. Once the codend (the end of the gear, where the fish acumulates) is on board, a door opens on the deck and the fish slid down to the working deck.

There, there are seven people awaiting, two of them will be enterely devoted to stomach sampling this year, Yolanda and Javier, and their work schedule is different from the rest. The other team, five people strong (there are two of them) will sample the fish. There are one or two people by the doors that hold the fish, directing it to the two conveyor belts, where the fish is sorted by species. According to their size and number they are kept in boxes or baskets.

Next step is weighting all boxes and baskets, unless we get a very large catch of a single species, in which case we weight a number of boxes and count the rest.

Once separated and weighted, there are different sampling protocols for different species. For some we only record length and catch per haul. Others are also sexed, or even weighted individually. For a minority, what we call our target species, we also register sexual maturity stage and for a few of them we collect otoliths and gonads. We will talk about all this later.

For the time being I will just say that lacking the figures for the last haul, my colleagues have sorted and weighted about 4 t of yellowtail flounder, about 250 kg of American plaice, nearly 200 kg of skate and about 150 kg of wolffish, some of them in the range of 20 kg per individual. Of course there were many other species but in lesser amounts. Now think of all the work behind: sort manually 5000 kg of fish, carry the about 125 boxes to the weight and then measure, sex, weight a few thousands. What do you think? Are you in for next year? Oh and by the way, all this work is done on a moving surface… some times to the point of sending stuff flying off the tables.

I think we will sleep very well tonight, and we hope you’ll do the same.