Social Networking - a far cry from link calls and VHF!

In business terms they would be known as 'early adopters' - people who take up with a new product or service when it first appears on the market.  Fishing, despite being a a traditional industry, has plenty of early adopters when it comes to new products or services that improve fishing performance. So, with full access to the internet restricted to bigger boats that can afford the luxury of sat comms it's good to see a few of the smaller vessels make use of new technology, like social networking sites through using Inmarsat C and the mobile phone networks. Of course, fishermen for many years have made use of their VHF radios and 'big sets' at sea to create their own kind of fishermen's social network between vessels from different ports and even countries!

Budding Rose taken from her pair-seine partner Lapwing - the boats fish from Peterhead in Scotland.

Today, a handful of smaller boats have their own blogs, Newlyn's Crystal Sea II and Peterhead's Budding Rose are two examples. The Scottish boat is part of a pair-seine team, her partner-in-crime being the Lapwing. The boats work in the North Sea, off the Shetlands and over in the Norwegian sector on the Bergen Bank in the summer months. Sometimes, they target hake like the Newlyn netting fleet and there are photos of good hauls of hake on the blog.

More recently a few boats have begun to experiment with Twitter to chronicle their daily fishing activity. Yesterday, with Alan the Ajax's skipper now signed up to Twitter, we learnt that while fishing over 100 miles west of Newlyn deep off the coast of Ireland she had been towed by a big Spanish trawler - then late last night we heard the catch results when half way through hauling her gear on the first day - with 100stone (approx. 650Kg) of 2-4Kg hake - good fishing - but with the forecast giving SW 5-7, a very uncomfortable night in store!

Hopefully, more boats will be encouraged to get to grips with the technology and find the time to bring their fishing stories to a computer, tablet or smart phone screen near you!