Sashimi Seiner from SEAS
Cummins Vessel Reference #721
As the ex-vessel cost of tuna continues to squeeze the margins for tuna canners, the advantages of high quality and high value sashimi grade tuna become ever more attractive. Writing for their April 2013 in-house publication, SAPMER CEO Yannick Lauri explained the French firm’s Indian Ocean tuna fishery, “The year 2012 has proven once again the pertinence of SAPMER’s development strategy initiated in 2007, with the order of its first three tuna seiners, which introduced a new world wide concept of tuna value enhancing.”
December 2013 saw the 90-meter Belle Isle, the seventh in this series of advanced tuna seiners, delivered to SAPMER by the South East Asia Shipyard (SEAS). SEAS is a subsidiary of the French shipbuilder PIRIOU. With a beam of 14,5 meters the boat is impressive in its fishing power. The boat will fish a 1.2-kilometer long by 270-meter deep net that will be anchored at one end by a 1000-HP power skiff powered by a Cummins KTA38 engine. The power is handy of starting the net off the boat at the beginning of a set but really does its work when it is “towing off” from the starboard side of the seiner while it recovers its net from the port side.
The purse seine winch and power block are supplied by the French firm Bopp. The dimensions of the fishing equipment are impressive but it is in the handling of the catch that the SAPMER boats show their excellence.
When fish are brailed from the net they are brought to a specialized hatch that delivers then gently to the main processing deck. Here they are moved by conveyor belt to one of eight refrigerated minus-17 degree Celsius brine tanks, with a total volume of 539 cubic meters. The fish are held in the brine for up to 24 hours, depending on their size, until they have been taken down to minus-8-degree Celsius. The smaller skip-jack freeze faster than the large and preferred yellow fin. From the brine tanks, the fish continue their way forward on the conveyor belt to one of six 100-ton/day freezer holds with a total of 1470 cubic meters. Carefully lowered into the holds by baskets, they are stored there at -40 degrees. A dedicated eight-man crew carries out all of the fish handling below decks.
In addition to the eight freezer-room crew, the Belle Isle has a crew of 25 on-deck and in the wheelhouse. Capt. Jourdren Laurent took the seiner on her maiden voyage from SEAS Vietnamese shipyard. He explained to a visitor that this would begin with ten days of travel south and through the Straits of Malacca into the Indian Ocean to Mauritius whose flag the vessel will fly. The boat will then make fishing voyages of not more than five weeks. After which the catch will be delivered either in the Seychelles or to Mauritius nearly 1000 nautical miles to the south. At Mauritius the tuna will be processed as required and loaded into containers that will maintain the same -40 degree temperatures for their delivery to customers including the high-end Japanese sashimi market.
To maximize the value of the catch in this fashion requires the careful handling and super cold temperatures described above. To support the demands of these freezers, as well as the extensive hydraulics required for the fishing operations and the vessel’s electric propulsion motor requirements, the owners have opted for an advanced diesel electric system. At the heart of this are four Cummins KTA50-DM diesels each delivering 1240 kW of power at 1800 RPM to generator sets. This system allows a wide range of variables to both conserve fuel and/or meet maximum electrical demands including vessel speeds of 15.5-knots. The appropriate generation and distribution of power is managed by the engineering crew from a sophisticated set of interfaces and controls supplied by the Canadian firm TECHSOL.
With the engineers concentrating on balancing the vessel’s electrical needs, they can set the monitor on their control panel so that it is replicated on the bridge. In this way the bridge crew can be informed of the engine room activities at a glance while keeping track of the vast array of monitors that display signals from long and short range radar as well as multiple sonars that display both 45 and 90 degrees to port and starboard. The vessel also carries and can deploy up to 35 compact solar-powered remote sonars that are set out on rafts and report their signals back to the bridge on the Belle Isle.
With such a complex and expensive asset as this tuna seiner represents, the reliability and redundancy of systems is essential. Operating, as they do, in waters that have been prone to pirate attacks they carry additional insurance in the form of five armed guards bringing the total crew size to 38 people.
The delivery of the Belle Isle is an affirmation of the approach to value adding and quality in the tuna seine fishery that SAPMER CEO Yannick Lauri has written about. It is also the intent of the firm’s achievement of the Friends of the Sea Certification (http://www.friendofthesea.org/fisheries.asp?ID=73) for their tuna along with a quest for SA 8000 social accountability certification. For 2014, the company has two 80-meter diesel-electric tuna seiners under construction at the SEAS shipyard that will be deployed in the Western Pacific Fishery.
For further information:
Jean-Marie Nicot-Berenger
PIRIOU Singapore
360 Orchard Road
International Building #11-03A
238869 Singapore
Phone: 65 6733 4020
Fax: 65 6733 4024
E-mail: Web: jm.nicot@piriou.com.sg
Nadine Rolland
Communications Manager
PIRIOU, France
Tel: 02 98 97 09 48
Email: communication@piriou.fr
Thierry Lebohec
Marine Sales Manager
Cummins France.
Mobile: 33 6 72 87 28 63
Email: t.lebohec@cummins.fr
Web: www.cummins.fr
Alan Haig-Brown
Over 30 years as an author for global commercial marine and fishing publications backed with hands-on experience on commercial fishing boats and coastal freighters makes Alan Haig-Brown uniquely qualified to provide vessel reference articles for Cummins Marine. You can find him in shipyards around the world, and on his own website, www.haig-brown.com.
