An early start

Morning! Deckhands, bridge and Teo, the IT technician have got up today at the same time as Spanish workers at home, with the difference that on board it is three hours earlier… Readers from other years know this means we have started the day with deep-sea fishing, where we need to shoot so much cable that 45 minutes can lapse since the gear goes overboard until it actually starts fishing.

And that’s precisely what we are doing, with a wind that is now down to 26 knots but was 34 at the time of shooting the gear. It is also rather cold. On the other hand we have full visibility and we see some patches of blue sky.

The night has been short or long, depends how you look at it. I got the feeling nobody has slept since 4, when the ship started pitching and rolling. A night fit for velcro pyjamas. I am specially sorry for Iñaki and Andrés, in the prow cabin, where the pitch is worst and on top of it they have one of the anchors banging practically on their bunk heads.

And our last haul last night? Very well, thank you very much! We got a bit of everything: dogfish, a few Greenland halibuts, chimaeras, antimoras, Nezumia grenadiers, a handful of beautiful black deep-sea fish and plenty of invertebrates for Rai. We will post pictures soon. 

The weather this morning

For those unfamiliar with fishing this is a very nice drawing lifted from the website of SIMRAD, a company present in every ship. Here you can see the otter doors (A and B), which keep the gear open, the rockhopper or groundrope (E), the headline (C), which has floats that keep the trawl open vertically  and the codend (D), where fish are caught. In this drawing it is not very obvious but the bottom trawl goes well behind the ship. Now, in our case, we shot 2800 m of cable and depth is about 1400 m, so remember Pitagoras and do the math.