New Antarctic III set for spring 2024 delivery
THE RECENTLY ordered new midwater pelagic trawler for a local fishing partnership will be the first in the Shetland fleet to fully comply with new environmental regulations for large marine diesel engines.
Last month, Spanish shipyard Zamakona announced it had signed an agreement with Fiskebas Fishing Co Ltd to build a new 69.6 metre trawler to replace the fishing partnership’s existing vessel Antarctic II (LK145).
To be built to a design from Skipsteknisk (Alesund, Norway), high focus has been given to efficiency in water circulation within the cargo tanks. The vessel will have accommodation for 14 crew.
Antarctic II engineer and company shareholder John Arthur Poleson said delivery of the new vessel is expected to be in spring of 2024. He said potential delays due to Brexit and Covid had already been built into the schedule.
Poleson said the new vessel would follow the same particulars all the other recent newbuilds for Shetland partnerships had with an emphasis on reliability and fish handling.
As a commercial vessel built after January 2021 and operating in the North Sea and northeast Atlantic she will have to comply with the International Maritime Organisation’s (IMO) NOx Tier 3 regulation.
This means the vessel will have to carry vast amounts of AdBlue (40 tonnes) for all her engines above 130kw of power output to reduce emissions of oxides of nitrogen of the exhausts.
“There are just two small engines on board that will run without AdBlue, all the others will have that requirement,” he said.
With the current Antarctic II built in 2004, Poleson said the time was right to upgrade the vessel and with it the business.
“Everybody wants to upgrade to have a good vessel to work with,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with the vessel we have, but she is almost 20 years old, and it is the time where you start thinking about a new one.
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“Keeping the boat any longer would mean it is worth nothing when you try and sell it.
“Fishing is going reasonably well, and we are getting good prices for the fish, so this is now the time to go for it, and it’s part of upgrading your business.”
He said the partnership intends to continue fishing their quota until early in 2023 after which Antarctic II will be put on the market.
In December last year the business owning the largest local pelagic trawler Altaire confirmed that it had ordered a new vessel, while in 2019 three new pelagic trawlers – Charisma, Zephyr and Adenia – were delivered to Whalsay based fishing partnerships.
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