Blog post
First survey day – First hauls and little fish
Not too much fish to see up to now, but we just finished our first fishing track.
First haul
As expected it was not a very big catch (app. 30 kg), containing 10% young herring, 90% sprat and one sea trout.
Second haul
The second haul we did was a surface trawl. We decided on this, as we saw loads of noise near the surface and we wanted to see where these bubbles (bubbles create acoustic noise which makes data in this area unusable) come from. As more or less expected we found only jellyfishes, which could contribute to a noise enhancement.
Third haul
Still only very small schools to be seen on the echograms. We fished on the first reasonable dense appearance of tiny schools. This time herring (60%; 40% sprat of the 60kg catch) dominated with few sprat.
Previously we decided, because of the wind, that it would be a good idea to skip going out of the sheltered area ,we are in at the moment, as it was initially planned. Now we just got to know that the wave heights out there are of about 3.4 m. SO in brief good decision to stay sheltered! No only for the sake of us but also our data would become absolutely unusable, resulting in echograms filled up with bubbles.
