Third trawl and change of the cruise track

For the third trawl of this cruise we set out the net, mainly because we couldn’t agree on what kind of fish would be sitting there at the bottom (see echogram below).
Every time we pass the shelf edge we see those kind of bottom pillows before the typical blue whiting snakes are rising.The only thing most of us were convinced of was that it would not be blue whiting…
To our surprise, the catch turned out to be a mix of mainly blue whiting, silver smelt, mackerel, some hake, a grey gurnard and a few mesopelagics. More or less the North Atlantic platter…
  


The weather predicts gale warnings from south-eastern direction, so we decided to cut short our current transect a bit, in order to get North quicker and avoid the risk of loosing to much time out in the far West… With such weather conditions, we always run into the risk of not being able to use the acoustic data and not being able to fish…

To finish this post, a few pictures taken while hauling the net: