New craft ‘hugely important’ for Mowi Scotland fleet
Three new landing craft ordered by Mowi Scotland will be hugely important to the salmon farmer’s operations, Don Macleod, Mowi Scotland’s delicing systems and fleet development manager has told Fish Farming Expert.
The Beinn Dearg, the first of the 27-metre x 12-metre Dutch-built boats, has already arrived at Fort William. It will be used as a service vessel and for transporting hydrogen peroxide for use in treating salmon for amoebic gill disease (AGD).
The second landing craft, the Beinn Bhreac, is due to arrive in the second week in April and will operate between Harris and Lewis and the north mainland.
Version six Hydrolicer
The third of the vessels, the Beinn Nebheis, will be fitted with the latest iteration - version six - of the Hydrolicer and new PG HydroFlow ejector pumps, which have no moving parts that can come into contact with the fish. Mowi Scotland is hoping to have the Beinn Nebheis by the beginning of August.
“They will be hugely important,” said Macleod, who had 13 years’ experience as a farm manager for the Scottish Salmon Company and Mowi before becoming Mowi’s Lewis and Harris area manager and then taking on his current role in December 2017.
“We had a vessel hired in from Delta Marine up until Christmas but there was not enough capacity.
“With this vessel we can do jobs without refilling with peroxide for AGD. You use a very light dose of peroxide for the AGD baths and the fish respond to it very well.”
The landing craft are built by Nauplius Workboats in Groningen and are on 10-year contracts from Norway-based DESS Aquaculture Shipping, a joint venture between Mowi and Deep Sea Supply (DESS), part of Norwegian shipping company Solstad.
Milestone for DESS
Following the announcement of the contracts last April, DESS Aquaculture commercial director Kjetil Løseth said the company would be setting up a new Scottish company, likely to be headquartered in Fort William or Kyleakin, and seeking more customers.
In the meantime it will run Scottish operations from the Solstad Offshore office in Aberdeen.
“It is a milestone for us, our first boat in Scotland,” said Løseth, who added that DESS also had a fish carrier currently on its way across the Atlantic to British Columbia, western Canada.
