Advice on fishing opportunities of pelagic fish stocks released this week

Photo. Svanhildur Egilsdóttir

ICES will release its advice on fishing opportunities in 2022 for widely distributed pelagic fish stocks, including NE-Atlantic mackerel, blue whiting and Norwegian spring-spawning herring, next Thursday, 30 September. The advice will be available on the ICES webpage at 10:00 am (Icelandic time), and at the same time on the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute (MFRI) webpage (hafogvatn.is). The Monday after, 4 October, ICES will then release it advice for redfish fishery in the Irminger Sea, which has been zero for several years.

This Friday, MFRI will release advice on capelin fishery for the upcoming winter fishing season (2021/2022). The research vessels Árni Friðriksson and Bjarni Sæmundsson finished acoustical measurements of the capelin stock last week and analyses of the data are on-going. These research cruises were a collaboration between Iceland and Greenland.

The initial fishing advice for capelin for the season 2021/2022, of 400 thousand tons, was given in December 2020. That advice was according to the current management plan and based on acoustical measurements on immature part of the stock in September 2020. The uncertainty around the relationship between abundance estimation of immature capelin in the autumn and the fishable mature stock a year later, is accounted for in the management plan meaning that the initial advice is precautionary. The analyses of the data obtained in the surveys in recent weeks is not completed yet, but the preliminary results indicate that the expectations for the upcoming fishing season will hold. Hence, it is foreseeable that MFRI will advise on higher catches than according to the initial advice.