HB Grandi: Saithe playing hard to get

Therney sailed on the 17th of February, with the first part of the trip spent in the Skerja Deeps looking for deep water redfish.

‘We're being drydocked after this trip, so it's important to get what we can of deep water redfish now as we don't see so much of them over the summer months,' Kristinn Gestsson said, and commented that the weather has played a big part in this trip's progress.

‘We must have become lazy after two or three very mild winters, but this one has made up for them. There has been constant rough weather for weeks on end, with a prevailing south-westerly wind of 20m/sec and more with a six to seven metre wave height. We have been pushed around by the weather off the south coast all last week and when it was clear that there wouldn't be fishing weather down here, we decided to try off the Westfjords instead. We did fairly well there on haddock and in some reasonable weather. Haddock is like the saithe in that there hasn't been a lot of it about recently,' he said and added that it is invaluable for skippers these days how much more precise the weather forecasts are now than they were a few years ago.

‘The 24-hour forecasts are very accurate and it's rare if the weather doesn't follow what has been predicted. The long-term forecasts are also a lot more reliable, which means that organise fishing better in advance and shift to different fishing grounds if things look black for a few days,' Kristinn Gestsson said.