How does your summer weekends look like? Fishing is your favorite down-time? Get some hint for your next session thanks to Fredrick von Elern insight.
For those that don’t know Fredrik von Elern yet, he is a TIMEZERO ambassador in Sweeden. Let him introduce himself: “My name is Fredrik von Elern 49 years old, I have a 17 year old daughter and a 15 year old son. I’m born and brought up on the Swedish west coast in a village called Grebbestad. Being grown up in an environment with a strong influence from the sea have affected my choices in life, I’m a master mariner, even though since early 2000 working ashore, but still in the shipping business. I have great interest in sportfishing and have been developing deep sea fishing in Sweden since the late -90’s, searching for and exploring fishing grounds down to +500m. In July 2013 all research and exploring paid off, I manged to catch a 204 cm long and 111,3 Kilos Halibut. The heaviest fish ever registered in the Swedish sportfishing records.”
So how is a fishing weekend for this master mariner ?
“Hunting the Big Fish and the Odd Species drives us to search for and locate hard bottom structures at deep waters. To find these areas we need to do research already ashore, good relations with skippers of the trawlers helps a lot, the areas we are looking for are the areas they will avoid, most of the skippers we talk to are also eager to learn about what we are doing and hear about our expeditions.
We have, for a couple of years, been fishing at an area with depths from 310m down to 400m, now we had decided to go deeper. Our ambition is to find new species like Blue Ling, Black belly rosefish, Greenland Shark and Sailray among others.
We discussed an area that we had passed and briefly looked at before, but never fished from an anchored boat with depths from 400m to 450m.
With all preparations made for an off shore trip of +24hrs, we set course to this new area, located about 40 NM from the Swedish Coast. Weather was great and after a couple of hours we arrived at the location.
Arriving at a new ground, we always try to plot the area by passing in N-S and E-W directions; where is the hard bottom? Where are the transistions from hard bottom to soft bottom? At this specific case where we were searching for bottom with gravel, which is often found at the transitions.
Sounders are used with 200kHz for the narrow beam to get as good precision as possible. At these depths is it possible to determine bottom type and depth by the strength of the echo and the scale on the sounder, but depth figures are not shown at the sounders. That’s why PBG cannot be used with 200kHz, however with 50kHz it is still possible.
Using TIMEZERO with a splitted screen plotter/sounder, using the event mark creates a screendump, which is most useful in the work to get a good plot of the area, also being able to locate already passed structures with the cursor on the echosounder view.
It took us about one hour to find out where we wanted to position the boat. Making two drifts over the area to determine in what direction the boat would go, which was done easily with the help of the bearing and distance tool on TIMEZERO finding the right position to drop the anchor.
With FASA positioned over our desired ground of gravel, dropping our baits to the bottom, we didn’t have to wait long for the fish to bite.
By using a technique of changing the mooring of the anchorline in the boat in combination of paying out anchorline where we were able to cover a large area. In this way we could continue to stay over productive grounds for 19 hrs before retrieving the anchor and setting course back home.
Good preparations, research and well working equipment, helped us to have a rewarding fishing during our stay at this location. Catching; Ling, Tusk and two nice Sailrays, which both of them where released back to the sea.”
Fredrik is using TZ Professional and fishing charts, find out more about his equipment >> here <<
