32 NATIONAL FISHERMAN • MARCH 2013 For updated news, visit www.nationalfisherman.com

&Boats gear TRAwL TECHNOLOgy

The wooden trawl door is as basic to a Southern shrimp trawler as gumbo is to New Orleans. Wooden doors have

been around since at least the 1880s when fishermen started putting engines in their boats large enough to pull an ot-ter trawl through the bays and the near-shore waters.

More recently, varieties of metal doors with promises of fuel savings have been pulled by shrimp boats, but it’s wooden doors you mostly see hanging from a shrimp boat’s outriggers.

Now comes a radically different way to spread your nets that could result in a lot of shrimpers hauling their wood or steel doors off their boat and sticking them in the back corner of some storage

By Michael Crowley

A Southern shrimper takes flight with a new towing system that saves fuel and reduces bycatch

Winged trawls

Randy Skinner’s trawl system keeps the net

spread to its full opening.

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The Winged Trawling System reduces bycatch by pushing fish away from the oncoming net.

Wings deployed at sea

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locker. It’s a wing-like affair, and when a shrimp boat has a pair of them hanging from its outriggers, it’s been described as looking like the boat is towing two Cessna airplanes behind it.

Randy Skinner of Fairhope, Ala., inventor of the Winged Trawling Sys-tem, admits that, “out of the box it’s a little different, but the bottom number is profit. You don’t really care what it looks like hanging on your boat. The shrimp production is about the same, but you are using only half the fuel.”

Skinner is a longtime shrimper and has pulled traditional Southern trawl doors and nets on all the boats he’s owned. Then about five years ago he began thinking about how to keep a shrimp net spread open while almost eliminat-ing the drag that trawl doors create as they are being pulled through the water. Reduced drag, of course, would result in reduced fuel consumption and thus a smaller fuel bill at the dock. Those ru-minations led to the Winged Trawling System.

“I’ve pulled trawl doors for almost 40 years, and I would not go back to doors,” Skinner says. “We’ve worked in rough water, shallow water, calm water and deep water. There have not been any negative drawbacks. You go back to the dock and take 2,000 gallons on your boat instead of 4,000 gallons. That’s a big savings.”

The wings of the trawling system are constructed of marine-grade aluminum that’s been blasted and then given a coat-ing of urethane paint.

Much of the work on the wings and setting up Skinner’s shrimper to tow them was done at Steiner Shipyard in Bayou La Batre, Ala., where Russell Steiner, the boatyard’s owner became

a partner in the development of the Winged Trawling System.

“Without his help it wouldn’t have taken off the way it has,” Skinner says.

The wing’s foil shape on its topside helps keep it near the seabed when it’s being towed. “It’s not just the weight that holds it down,” Skinner says, “but the flow of water across the top of it that pushes down on it.

“Everything works the same as with trawl doors,” but the Winged Trawling System spreads the net apart to its full 100 percent opening, whereas “trawl doors are only 75 percent efficient as far as holding open the net.”

A shrimper saves on fuel because in-stead of running his engine at 1,500 rpm pulling trawl doors through the water, the engine is only turning 1,050 with a pair of wings behind it. He no longer has to use the power of the boat to keep the net spread open.

Towing the trawl system also “greatly reduces bycatch,” according to Skin-ner. NMFS videos of an early Winged Trawling System show the walls of mud created by the trawl doors that tend to herd the fish in front of the net until they tire and the net overtakes them.

In contrast, the wing is off the bottom

Randy Skinner compared the fuel consumption between the Winged Trawl System and trawl doors for an 87-hour period. To get figures for the trawl

doors, Skinner consulted the boat’s previous owner, who had fished the boat for 25 years pulling 1040 wooden trawl doors. For the new trawl system Skinner relied on figures he generated while running the same boat.

The shrimper is a steel double-rigged 80-foot trawler with two 3406 Cater-pillar engines hooked up to marine gears with a 6:1 reduction that are turning 60-inch wheels in nozzles.

In both cases the boat was pulling 65-foot nylon nets and trying to main-tain a towing speed of about 3 knots. “We averaged between 2.8 and 3.2,” Skinner says.

Skinner was pulling two nets, each with a winged Trawl System, at 1,050 rpm and burning 9.3 gallons per hour for a total of 809 gallons.

Again, using figures from the boat’s previous owner, the engine speed while pulling the trawl doors had to be pushed up to 1,400 rpm to keep the net open. At that rpm level, the Cats would have burned 23 gallons per hour over an 87-hour period. The total for the period would be 2,001 gallons.

At $3.15 per gallon for diesel fuel the cost was $2,549 for the 87 hours towing the winged Trawl System. It would have been $6,303 for the same period with trawl doors hooked up to the nets. That comes out to a fuel sav-ings of $3,745 with the winged Trawl System.

The annual projected savings pulling the trawl system is $43 per hour for 2,500 hours. A total of $107,625. — M.C.

Fuel no longer a drag

Continued on page 37

Wing stowed at sea Wing stowed docksideOnce the system is

locked to the mounting

rack it can be lowered to the stern bulwark.

A line running from the boat’s mast to the center of the wing is used to hoist it to a semivertical position, which clears the deck.

MARCH 2013 • NATIONAL FISHERMAN 37To subscribe, call 1-800-959-5073

&Boats gear TRAwL TECHNOLOgy

Continued from page 33and “out ahead of the net. The leading edge trails away from the center, pushing fish out and away from it and the net,” Skinner says. Shrimp, however, move differently through the water and are not affected by the wing as it passes over them. So they drop back into the net.

In addition, the net is hitting the bot-tom over an area less than 2 feet wide, versus the swath that trawl doors pull-ing 65-foot nets are cutting through. “You are not doing near the damage to the bottom. The net touches, but you are not having to plow with the trawl doors to spread the net. It’s a lot gen-tler,” Skinner says.

A third benefit is fewer entangle-ments. Nets with wings don’t hang up in wrecks nearly as easily as shrimp nets with trawl doors. “We hit a good size wreck, and it put a dent in a little sec-tion of the wing and it just bounced around it and we kept going. With trawl doors we would have captured it and been all hooked up in it,” Skinner says. Pulling the wings, he’s been hooked up five times but has never torn up the net. “We just popped off it — net and all.”

Then there is the noise factor. “One of the things that’s hard to get used to is how quiet the boat becomes,” Skinner notes. He attributes that to the fact that the engine’s rpms are lower. “Where typically you’re towing at 1,500 to 1,600 there’s turbulence, propeller noise, and

engine muffler noise, now it’s down to, at most, 1,100 rpm. Everything is just real quiet, and it’s nice.” Running at a lower engine speed should also reduce engine maintenance, oil consumption and wear on the propeller.

In addition, the wings allow a shrimp-er to control the height of the net’s cork line. “You can’t do that with trawl doors,” Skinner says. “It’s a huge plus. If there are a lot of jellyfish or unwant-ed fish in the area that you don’t want to catch, you can lower the bib on the net. And the lower you run the net, the more fuel efficient it is.”

The size of the wings depends entirely on available deck space, specifically the amount of clearance between the aft side of the winches and the stern of the boat. “You’ve got to be able to lift it and set it in the rack,” Skinner says. The “rack” holds a wing’s inboard end, once that is locked in place, the wing’s after end is lowered on to the stern’s bulwark.

Skinner’s 80-foot shrimper has 40 feet of open deck behind the winches, which is enough for his two 51-foot wings.

The first pair of wings he tried was 60- feet long. “We were able to pull them, but they gave us trouble when we came into the dock.”

Despite the size of the wings when compared with trawl doors, Skinner says they don’t bounce or move around as much when they are out of the water. “If it hits the water while on the outrig-ger, it just kind of patters on the wave top. It doesn’t want to dive.”

In rough conditions both wings can be placed on the deck at the same time. “It’s convenient because you can do it quickly. In 15 minutes or less you can have both the wings on the boat and chained down.”

Skinner estimates that the wings will last a lot longer than trawl doors. He gives them a 10-year life span, as op-posed to having to replace wooden trawl doors every other year. He has a patent pending on the Winged Trawl-ing System. When that’s approved, he’ll be selling them through his company Environmental Trawling Solutions and expects a good reception. “Old-timers really surprised me. They are anxious for us to put them on the market.”

Michael Crowley is the Boats & Gear editor for National Fisherman.

For contact information on companies mentioned in this article, see page 45.

“One of the things that’s hard to get used to is how quiet the boat becomes.”

— Randy SkinnerShRimpeR

Cover story

Continued from page 23welcome to join him.”

Carlton Joyce, now 73 years old, continues to lobster as well as indulge his hobby — horses. He harnesses up a gelding to a four-wheel buggy and in-vites me to sit in the back. He puts the horse into an easy trot, while I pepper him with questions.

“I used to go hakin’ down there. I had a 34-foot boat, and the most I ever put in her was 10,000 pounds.” Accord-ing to Carlton Joyce, island fishermen landed 3 million pounds of fish in 1936, about 5,000 pounds per boat per day.

“We had three fish factories then,” he

says as he holds the reins and guides his horse along the quiet road. “It was most-ly slack salted cod back then, but in the ’60s I had to run to Vinalhaven to sell.”

Carlton Joyce used to haul his trawls by hand, but gave it up when lobstering improved. “It got to be too much, home at 10, up again at 2. Finding somebody to bait the trawls.” He tried gillnetting in the 1980s, but got into it too late. “A few of them did OK at it, but I don’t think it did the resource any good. They started with 6-inch mesh, and when fish got scarce they went down to 5 1/2.” That was about the end of cod fishing as a going concern in eastern Maine.

Carlton reaches the end of the road and turns the buggy around. “I said to Jason, these cod may not come back in your time, but you might as well give this sentinel fishery a try.”

Should the cod ever return to their old haunts Joyce is likely to be one of the first to know, and at the same time he is preserving valuable skills for the next generation of fishermen, and hop-ing there is one.

Paul Molyneaux is a veteran fisherman and author of “The Doryman’s Reflection,” and “Swimming in Circles: Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans.”