Has anyone been following Schmidt Ocean Institute on Youtube?
There is a channel on Youtube for the Schmidt Ocean Institute and their boat, the Valkor. They run a brilliant submersible called SuBastion, goes to at least 4500m, with brilliant video quality and the ability to manually pick samples. They recently spent some time in Australia, first exploring the Bremer Canyon, then the Perth Canyon, then two of the canyons wide of Exmouth. Some of this stuff was previously unexplored. Staff was a mix of Full-time international operators and scientists and people from the WA Museum, including Glenn Moore. The dives are often long, unedited, and they do highlights for each week.
Below is a link to one of their shallow dives in the Bremer Canyon. By shallow , I mean starting 330 metres, going up to 184m, along the pateau for a bit, then back down again, working along one wall of the canyon.
if you want to skip to highlights, 1.41 in you find some fishng gear, a float sitting a couple of fathoms off the bottom. Doubtless attached to lost gear. This had me a bit perplexed, but it becomes clearer later in the video. they keep running across ropes stretched tight across the bottom. 1.50 in you are getting up the rise, and the sponge gardens are becoming brilliant. they find a Southern cray at 1.55 in 220m , a king crab a bit later, but there is a surprising lack of large fish life. But that all changes a few minutes later, get above 200m and the bottom and life is just brilliant. Mostly red snapper and swallowtail, but there is a surprise patch of Terakihi. These are common in Kiwi waters, a type of morwong, didn't know we had them over here. As they go shallower, the bottom flattens, reef largely disappers, but still the sponge gardens. They find a nice queenie at 2.42 in 184m, then go back over the edge. At 3.00, they find what was attached to those ropes--a plastic craypot. These were widely used up this way chasing snow crabs out on the mud, all strung off a common line, and were easily stackable by pulling the pin. So all that gear was likely just lost lines, snagged on the bottom, and snapped off. You can see one of them actually running under a ledge--this form of fishing is really only suited to the deep flat mud.
Defintely worth a watch.
crano
Posts: 712
Date Joined: 04/11/09
amazing colours
Some strange things on the perth canyon highlights clip.
Alan James
Posts: 2228
Date Joined: 30/06/09
Thanks for the link Ranmar
Some great footage there. Some years ago a deep dropper posted a pic on here of a fish he caught at the Rottnest trench. Being of Kiwi origin I recognised it as a fish I had seen and often caught in my NZ days. It was a Jackass Morwong commonly known in NZ as a tarakihi and highly regarded as a top table fish.
timboon
Posts: 2961
Date Joined: 14/11/10
Cheers for posting Ranmar,
Cheers for posting Ranmar, some of those sponge gardens are amazing...
Interesting they are using the placcy pots in a string out wide like that...
In SA King crab fishing the tides would be too strong for those light style pots...
timboon
Posts: 2961
Date Joined: 14/11/10
Cheers for posting Ranmar,
Cheers for posting Ranmar, some of those sponge gardens are amazing...
Interesting they are using the placcy pots in a string out wide like that...
In SA King crab fishing the tides would be too strong for those light style pots...
ranmar850
Posts: 2702
Date Joined: 12/08/12
Thats how they did it up here
When the big snow crab/champagne crab rush was on up between here to up beyond Carnarvon, they used those plastic pots in long strings. They were out on the mud over the edge of the shelf, around 200m + IIRC. They didn't use much ballast in the individual pots, just relied on the sheer weight of a long string to keep them down. They were working a lot of them, and they had the advantage of being very compact in the stack---you just pulled the pin on one side, folded them out, and they locked in together. That idea worked fine on mud, but where you have reef, you have the main line stretched across the bottom, and the chance of a snag must be very high. The way those ropes were strung down over the canyon wall, as a fisherman, I personally think that someone either screwed up, or got very brave.
Did anyone spot the Dacron on the bottom, in one of the sample-taking sequences? They were using the grab arm to sample a coral next to a ledge, and you could see some actual fishing line running along the bottom. It got in the way of taking the sample, and the growth was knocked off it--you could see a red fleck. I reckon it was Dacron--back in the days before the use of braid was widespread, dacron was the line of choice for deep dropping by commercials. Nylon mono was a disaster--the stretch meant that, when the line was all back on the reel, the stored energy in the stretch just crushed the spool. There was a goldband goldrush up here back in the nineties; the blokes involved found the limits of previously reliable commercial line gear like the biggest Alveys, which had been the go, adapted to run on either hydraulic or electric power. The spools were just exploding. Someone in Geraldton built an awesome alloy-spooled deepdrop reel, hydraulic powered, for the job. I can remember a pair of them mounted on the transom of the Deb-a-Dell.
COASTALJOY
Posts: 79
Date Joined: 11/05/12
Deb a Dell
Was that after Deb a Dell went trap fishing Ranmar ? I trap fished on Deb-a Dell and Deb-aDell 2 out of Broome in the early nineties. On another boat we used alvey queens for goldband out of Darwin and had 200 lb mono on them and never had an issue with the spools exploding. Had an issue with the 200lb mono when it snapped once at the roller arm with a big shark on and the recoil when it snapped made a groove in my bare stomach about 2mm deep, you can still see the faint line now 26 years later.
He fishes, He fishes, He fishes, its the only thing in life. All he ever gets is hell from his fed up wife
ranmar850
Posts: 2702
Date Joined: 12/08/12
Miss Deb-a-Dell 2
They were fishing pretty deep, not the 70-80 m you might normally fish for goldband. Often 100-150m, and deeper. You had the old problem of needing a lighter line for less drag, or you just had too much belly in it. Alveys had no problems out to 50 fathoms, with 150lb mono, we fished those sorts of depths most of the time. I thuink the deepest I fished with an alvey was 60 fathoms, (100m) . They were anchoring on these fish in really deep water, using 1000m of craypot rope.
The Deb-a-Dell 2 crayfished out of here for some years, working 150 pots, was a partnership between 3 local fishermen who worked week on-week off. It went wetlining after that was dissolved. She was a pretty awesome seaboat, nothing really bothered it. Here's some video of here, posted on the Oceaneering Marine brokers website a couple of years ago,
www.youtube.com/watch