In at the deep end!

We finally heard from our friend Iván, who was meant to be here but got a job in dry land. Congratulations!

We have changed our initial plans for the day. We are in the westernmost zone of our study area and we got a very nice haul, small catch but very diverse, so we headed for the slope to give enough time to finish the sampling.

We can see five trawlers, a Japanese under the name Fukuyo Shimaru nr 68, that seemed to head for Canadian waters, and four Portuguese, two of which are called Santa Isabel and Pascoal Atlantico. When I say that we “see” them is a manner of speech, really, because we cannot see much further than our own noses in this fog. We usually spend many survey days wrapped in thick fog. Yesterday we had a visibility of several hundred meters, and we could make out another Spanish trawler, Playa Menduiña 2.

But back to our fishing: we have been in several strata today, at different depths, so the catch has changed quite a lot since this morning. At about 100 m we got a very diverse catch -although small: redfish, skate, capelin, silver hake, cod, haddock, herring, one or two American anglerfish. At about 300 m the catch changed again, mostly redfish, skates and white hake.

Now we are in one of our deepest strata, at 1200 m, but we will tell you about it tomorrow.

Herring

White hake



Silver hake



Capelin





Hello, poppy! American anglerfish