Through all of our trials, we have not experienced an increase in fuel consumption and FloMo is in commercial use in New Zealand again with no reports of increased consumption from our Skippers.

In a beam trawl trial in the Netherlands, the Skipper was able to drop his trawl speed from around 6 knots to 4.5 to 5 knots with no adverse effect on catch which saved fuel.

In terms of drag, we have done trials using twin rigs and if a substantive difference in drag was present we would have seen that in the way the trawl behaved in these instances.

Equally, the FloMo design creates laminar non-turbulent flow, so you don’t have the washing machine effect of a traditional codend.

We can design a FloMo to meet each trawler’s needs and its lifting gear capabilities. To date, we have seen catches of 40 – 50 tons of fish.

FloMo has not yet been developed to handle large seining volumes.

We recommend for optimum catch quality that the ratio of fish to water in the lift bag is 50:50. The water volume is displaced by the catch volume. So a Hoki trawler in NZ will typically target 20 tons and haul that along with 20 tons of water.

FloMo can be easily de-watered on the stern ramp or alongside the vessel if desired or should the Liftbag predominantly contain seawater.

FloMo can be used to catch any species of fish that you would normally target with a traditional codend.

A Scampi design is in progress and if these trials are successful, we can then consider designs for prawn and shrimp.

We use different tensile strengths based on the bag size of the unit. Through our extensive trialling, we have refined and developed the materials to the point where they are as resilient as a traditional codend.

Some skippers in New Zealand have been using the same gear for 4-5 years.

It depends on the damage but rips and tears in the retention modules can be laced. In the rare instance of a module being severely damaged carrying a spare module to replace the damaged one is an easy and quick fix at sea.

The modules are simply lashed together.

FloMo will attach to most traditional trawl set-ups, and we have trialled FloMo in pelagic or mid-water and bottom trawls. That said we do not currently have a design for large pelagic or seining trawls targeting big volumes.

We currently have four sizes of FloMo units and from here we tailor the design based on the Fishery and the Vessel.

Yes