As everyone knows, coastal fishing is now in full swing, with a total of around 800 boats having received coastal fishing permits this summer.
As with other types of fishing, proper catch handling is important to ensure quality and shelf life, and guidelines are available here. Good cooling of the catch is the most important factor in ensuring the quality and shelf life of the products, and Matís has therefore developed an ice calculator that is accessible on the company's website.
The Ice Calculator provides recommendations on the amount of ice needed to cool the catch down to 0°C based on sea temperature, as well as the ice required to maintain 0°C based on ambient temperature (e.g. in cold storage) and number of days. The data behind the ice calculator are based on thermodynamic models and cooling experiments.
At the beginning of June, a new regulation came into effect, which stipulates that all weighing of coastal catch is completed at the harbour scale where the ice ratio is fixed at 3%. There is a risk that the regulation acts as an incentive to limit ice use, and it may therefore be beneficial to utilise the ice calculator to estimate what the actual ice requirements are.
On the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute's website, you can monitor sea temperature in various locations around the country and it can be seen there, for example, that the average temperature in recent days in the Westfjords has been around 8°C. According to the ice calculator approximately 9 kg of ice should therefore be needed to cool every 100 kg of catch down to 0°C.
Catch composition, in terms of species and size of fish, affects how long it takes to cool the catch down to 0°C, and the cooling medium also matters greatly, as can be seen in this leaflet.