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TWO of Iceland's longest serving fresh fish trawlers are celebrating their 30th anniversary of active fishing this month.
The vessels, Ottó N Thorláksson RE-203 and Sturlaugur H Bödvarsson AK-10, are now both owned by HB Grandi, one of the country's largest fishing companies and both were built in Iceland to a quite revolutionary design of the time - based on the shape of a sperm whale.
The Ottó N Thorláksson was named after the first president of the Icelandic Confederation of Labour (ASÍ) and the addition of the ship to the then BÚR owned fleet was seen as a turning point at the time, and BÚR was one of the companies that subsequently became HB Grandi.
This was the first vessel built for BÚR in Iceland, although it had built 13 trawlers based overseas before that. Ottó was built with a new hull design that had been developed by Stálvík in co-operation with Swedish-based engineer Sigurdur Ingvarsson, based on the physiology of the sperm whale (búrhvalur in Icelandic). Since then, that hull design has been known as the BÚR pattern.
The stern gear was also innovative for its day, with a larger propeller than was usual in ships of this size, but made to turn more slowly. In an interview with Jón Sveinsson, Stálvík’s former managing director with the newspaper Morgunbladid in 2002, it emerged that the BÚR-pattern hulls performed exceptionally well in tank tests in Denmark, with 39 per cent less water resistance than other hulls tested until then had shown.
The other vessel, the Sturlaugur H Bödvarsson, or Sigurfari II as it was originally known, was built at Akranes. The trawler came to Haraldur Bödvarsson hf in the mid-1980s and had been bought to Akranes by the Fisheries Fund. Its ownership was then transferred to the HB Grandi fleet when Haraldur Bödvarsson hf and Grandi hf merged in 2004 (hence the name HB Grandi).
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