Early March GripShip, the commercial partner of AquaShip, has completed the first harvest operations from their wellboat “Grip Pacific”. The process was done in the Punta Arenas area in the south of Chile, where the vessel is operating on a long-term contract with Blumar Seafoods.
The new harvest module installed on “Grip Pacific” has a 14 line stun & bleed system with all relevant utilities, based on AquaShip in-house technology. The module was engineered, manufactured, assembled and tested at AquaShip’s premises in Lerwick, Shetland, before shipping to Chile for integration onboard “Grip Pacific”.
“Integrating our own harvest system onboard a conventional wellboat adds considerable value to our clients. We call this a Utility Vessel. We are offering this unique business proposition to fishfarmers worldwide, leveraging the in-house harvesting technology held by AquaShip UK.” GripShip General Manager Jorge Maluenda announced.
“From the former idea till the materialization through “Grip Pacific”, and now harvesting our fish we have seen great collaboration of GripShip locally as well as AquaShip in Shetland. This Utility Vessel means significant improvement to our overall operation,” Pedro Pablo Laporte, the Blumar Farming Manager who has overseen the project, said.
“Our next state of the art Utility Vessel is newbuild Aqua Caledonia, soon to be delivered from Balenciaga Shipyard in Spain. She combines 1.500 m3 wellboat capacity for treatment or transport of live fish with an integrated 12 lane AquaShip stun & bleed system, designed for harvesting of more than 10.000 fish per hour,” AquaShip Group CEO Sverre Taknes stated.
“Amongst several features attractive to our clients is the emergency response capabilities, in case of incidents calling for immediate harvesting. In our industry worst case scenarios do occur, and our Utility Vessels offers the ideal tool to save considerable value for our clients,” Taknes added.
