77 arrivals for the period
Whitefish totalled 2,600 boxes from two Scottish trawl landings. The Inverness registered Adventurer and the Peterhead registered Atlantic Challenge made the long trip to Rockall in search of better quality haddocks with a monkfish by-catch. Both vessels were hampered by the weather but despite this landed very good catches. Atlantic Challenge battled through storm Bert over last weekend taking 30hrs to make it to the Butt of Lewis for some respite from the storm. No Anglo landings this month with the fleet working further north.
Shellfish activity was busy. There were thirty-six landings from visiting prawn trawlers, which as ever combined with the efforts of the resident fleet.
Non-fishing saw thirty-nine arrivals; twenty-nine from the aquaculture sector for fuel, crew changes and day-running, eight visits from survey vessels, cargo vessel Link Star in for fuel and the Shetland tall ship Swan in for a new mast.
The Fifie Swan (picture by skipper Maggie Adamson) was built and launched in Lerwick in 1900, she fished Shetland waters for herring and whitefish for fifty years. Following retirement from fishing, she was converted to a houseboat in Grimsby before ending up neglected and submerged in Hartlepool. In 1991 a crew from Shetland travelled south, and made Swan as seaworthy as possible for the voyage back to Shetland where followed a four-year full restoration. The Swan finally began her new life as a sail training ship in 1998. In her first year she did 40 trips, and carried 450 trainees on board. Since then she has become a familiar sight not only in Shetland waters, but also in Orkney, on the West Coast of Scotland, in the fjords of Norway and off the Faroese coast. She has also taken trainees to ports in France, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, Norway and Holland and around the United Kingdom to take part in the Tall Ships Races. Earlier this year the Swan Trust decided that the main mast needed replacing, and with funding from SERCO Northlink the vessel came to Ullapool where Isle Ewe and Corrie boat builders fitted the brand new 70ft Douglas fir mast shaped from an Aberdeenshire tree. The full story of the mast creation fitting and Swan homecoming can be found on the Swan Trust YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@TheSwanTrust/video Films and images courtesy of Steven Gourlay.