Fisherman uses underwater camera to improve his trawl net

Correcting fishing gear with underwater video

For most fishermen, their gear is out of sight after shooting. Once the fishing gear is retrieved, fishermen must rely on their intuition to figure out why they had a good catch or not. But, for Darren McClemments, Skipper of the Golden Ray, CatchCam is removing the guesswork from fishing.

Darren didn’t know his gear was missing out on catching prawns until he used CatchCam to record what was going on in his trawl net. The video recorded with CatchCam showed that his gear wasn’t making proper contact with the seabed. As a result, he was losing prawns. Once back at the harbour, Darren knew exactly what alterations he needed to make to his gear to improve contact and fishing. 

“It’s not just about getting rid of fish; it is about making sure you are catching what you need to catch. We could clearly see that our sole rope was not sitting on the bottom and that we lost prawns. When we got back to the harbour, we measured up the gear and took two meshes out of the top sheet. Following this small alteration, we now have better contact, and the boat is fishing better.”- Darren

Watch Darren and Ben Collier from Northen Ireland Gears give their thoughts on CatchCam.