Mørenot’s Injector Flow Gear can Replace Rock Hoppers
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Among the many exhibitors at the November 2024 Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle, the Norwegian company Mørenot showcased its electric longline system and trawl doors and introduced its new Injector Flow Gear, a trawl sweep intended to replace rock hopper sweeps for fishing on hard bottom.
“The rock hopper gear is getting harder to find because of the war,” says Haraldur Arnason, Mørenot’s head of trawl systems. “A lot of the material originates in Russia and Ukraine.”
But scarcity of the rock hopper gear is not the main reason Mørenot developed the Flow Gear. Arnason notes that there are issues with operating rock hopper gear, and the company wanted to develop a product that would address those. “With the rock hopper, when it goes over a rock it flies off bottom and stays up long enough for fish to get under the net,” he says. “Or sometimes it flips the rock inside the net and then it tears the net.”
To resolve that problem, Mørenot’s Flow Gear is made of pieces of hard plastic shaped like half tubes, and these flip up over rocks and enable the sweep to stay close to the bottom. “Each piece is 2 feet wide and 18 inches deep,” says Arnason. “They hang from a chain footrope and are chained together. Some were breaking when we first designed them, then we added three pieces of steel horizontally along the lower edge.”
Arnason explains that if the gear is functioning as it should, it will show wear on the lowest of the steel bars and a little on the second. “If they tell us that they are getting wear on the top bar then this is not right and we have to make some adjustment,” says Arnason.
read more at nationalfisherman.com.
