Brim : Stepping down after half a century at sea

27.12.2021

Stepping down after half a century at sea

Brim's freezer trawler Örfirisey docked in Reykjavík before Christmas after a good trip on fishing grounds to the south and west of Iceland and off the Westfjords. This was the final trip for Örfirisey's skipper Thór Thórarinsson, ending a successful 50-year career at sea. Of this time, he has been on Örfirisey for around thirty years, since the trawler came to Iceland in 1992 from its previous owners in the Faroe Islands.

'I started with Grandi hf, Brim's predecessor, in 1989. For the first few years I was on fresher trawler Ásgeir, and moved across to Örfirisey when it arrived. The skippers then were Trausti and Símon, and I took over as skipper when Símon left the ship,' Thór said, adding that he can only be satisfied with his last trip.

'We started off the south coast and had mostly redfish and saithe. Then we shifted northwards to the Westfjords grounds and spent most of the trip there. We shot away on the Hali grounds and worked our way to the Thverálshorn. There, as on the deep bank west of the Westfjords grounds, catches were very mixed and we had cod, haddock, saithe, golden redfish and deep redfish. We spent some time on the Straumnesgrunn for some haddock, just to the east of the Djúpáll Gully, and fishing there was fine. Then we finished the trip on south-west grounds,' Thór said, commenting that this trip's catch was a green weight of around 800 tonnes of fish with a value of approximately 330 million krónur.