Results of winter-spring Okhotsk pollock fishery

The Russian Okhotsk pollock fishery in the first months of the year was progressing against the background of unfavourable weather conditions. Frequent storms changed by weather improvement, the catch rates either weakening or recovering. Besides, ice coverage was actively growing with the ice edge locating at a larger distance offshore than last year. By the end of the first ten days of March 2010 the ice area amounted to ca.70.5%, 7% up on last year. Heavy ice in the northeast part of the Sea of Okhotsk disabled the fleet's operations on the pollock grounds in the area.

The fishing fleet concentrated at the borderline of two subareas, North Okhotsk and Kamchatka Kurile. The pollock fishery was inexpedient also to the north of the 56th degree due to increased bycatch of juveniles. Besides, ices disabled the middle fleet to rise higher than the 54th degree North. As a result, in the A season the fishery pressure was focused on the Kamchatka-Kurile subarea, the pollock quotas in the area covered at 187%. That was encouraged not only by favourable fishery situation, good quality of raw fish, high roe yield, but also by the opportunity to cover the quotas in the two subareas of West Kamchatka all together. Due to large size of pollock females and good balance of sexes the roe yield exceeded the approved limits.

The roe yield in January 2010 only was close to 5000 tonnes. However the average level of quality was not high with domination of immature roe and sacks with thick membrane. The thing was that the fishery was conducted at large depths of 400-520 meters and it was focused on large pollock more fitting for production of headed pollock. All in all, in the fishing season more than 30,000 tonnes of pollock roe was produced. The price results at first auctions of Russian pollock roe in Busan were not very high. Buyers' bids were fairly low. Aggressive downward pressure on prices was exerted by the Japanese buyers bidding 3-4 USD per kilo of graded roe. Auction prices of pollock roe were below expectations, however with each product lot or by the auction to follow the prices did not decline, but even grew which could be also attributed to absence of product supplies from US fisheries to the markets of Asian countries.

Vladivostok-based fleet was the largest in number and catch volumes. The region's fishermen harvested 331,000 tonnes of pollock or 88.3% of allowed catch volumes. Pollock quotas of Magadan and Chukotka were covered at 90%. Kamchatka's commercial pollock quotas were covered at 84.7%.

Provisional figures on pollock catches and quota take-up in commercial winter-spring fishery

Pollock quota remainder in three main subareas of the Sea of Okhotsk amounts to 130,000 metric tons to be covered in the autumn-winter period.