First fish stocked in the Egg
Ten years of planning and effort come to fruition for floating closed containment system developer
Ovum, the developer of the Egg floating closed containment fish farm, yesterday reported that it has finally been able to put fish into the trial version facility of the facility moored in Romsdalsfjord, Norway.
In a post on LinkedIn, Ovum (a subsidiary of Hauge Aqua) said that after ten years of planning and lately hectic weeks of preparation, fish, people, and the Egg were finally ready.
“On Sunday 9 October, the first fish were put into the Egg. The new arrivals are 50,000 silvery 150-gram salmon smolts. The fish comes from Eik Settefisk and has been served Super Smolt feed in recent weeks,” wrote Ovum.
The company said there was an excited welcome party waiting for the first fish, which were delivered by wellboat company Rostein and will be grown to a kilo before being transferred to net pens.
“The smolts wandered around a bit at the start, but it didn’t take long before they started shoaling along the edge, as we hoped for.
“This is an important day for us who work with Egg technology. Getting here has not gone smoothly. It's all the greater when this milestone is reached,” said Hauge Aqua chief Cato Lyngøy.
The 21-metre-high closed containment system, dubbed the MiniEgg, is a trial version of a planned larger Egg, which will be 44 metres high and have 10 times the volume of the MiniEgg’s 1,850 m³.
The composite-walled MiniEgg was constructed by Herde Kompositt at its facility in Ølve on the shore of Norway’s famous Hardangerfjord.
It was then transported 600 km north on a to Gjermundnes in Romdalsfjord in Møre og Romsdal county, where Hauge Aqua has obtained permission to use a so-called “dark green” salmon farming permit. Dark green permits have the strictest requirements for sea lice management and reducing risk of escapes.
The farm will be operated by Prophylaxia AS, a company majority owned by Alsco AS, the investment vehicle of Johan Andreassen and Bjørn-Vegard Løvik, who founded US-based on-land salmon farmer Atlantic Sapphire.
“This is proof of concept in practice. Now we can confirm whether what we have thought is correct; biologically, technically, and commercially,” said Siri Vike and Trond Severinsen, who were present from the management of Ovum.
