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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Industrialized Fisheries in Arctic & Antarctic Waters
like the UK or Germany. Only the vessels of the traditional, non-industrialized fisheries of nations
like Spain, France or Portugal were able to embark on extended journeys, due to their salt-fish
production. While the US and Canada would definitely have been able to introduce modern fishing
technology and in particular steam-trawling, their fleets hesitated or even rejected the new
technology (Balcom, 1996) and thus no industrialized fishing vessels of these nations showed up on
the fishing grounds of the Atlantic Arctic.
After World War II
This situation changed really for the first time only, when after the end of WWII and the
reconstruction period of the international distant-water fishing fleets, competition on the near-by
fishing grounds of the main consumption areas reached such levels that overfishing became a reality,
and more importantly the catch per unit effort began to decrease dramatically. In addition, the
changes of the political map of the North Atlantic which included sovereignty for Iceland,
Newfoundland joining Canada and giving up close ties to the UK, and in particular the first steps of
the extension of national fisheries limits of these nations, caused the European industrialized distant-
water fishing nations to lose access to their traditional fishing grounds (Thor, 2000). If these fishing
nations wanted to continue distant water fishing activities and thus ensure the supply of their
domestic markets with fish caught by their own fleets, the options available to them were limited.
Basically all of them faced a situation very similar to the situation that made Nazi Germany one of
the most technologically advanced fishing nations during WWII. Any increase of landings required
the development of fishing technology and in particular fish preservation technology that allowed
harvesting of fishing grounds not used up to that point: fishing grounds much further to the main
areas of consumption, most notably Arctic and later on Antarctic areas (Janssen, 1939).
The use of such fishing grounds required new technologies for the preservation of the catch
onboard the fishing vessels. The most promising technological approach seemed to be deep-freezing
technology. Fishing companies in Nazi Germany had spent a lot of effort on developing technical
solutions for onboard freezing of the catch and finally developed two experimental factory-freezer
vessels. While the HAMBURG, a former cargo vessel, was converted into a floating frozen fish
factory that should process the catch of traditional trawlers on the fishing grounds, the other ship,
the WESER, was a real factory freezer, meaning a vessel that combined catch and deep freezing
technology onboard a single vessel (Hilck & Auf dem Hövel, 1979). Both vessels finally failed to
operate on Arctic fishing grounds due to WWII, but at least it has been proven that the concept of
the factory freezer trawler could become a reality (Heidbrink, 2008b).
After the end of WWII a number of European distant water fishing nations, most notably the UK,
West Germany and the Soviet Union, revisited the concept of the factory freezer trawler and began
to develop factory freezer trawlers that combined the idea of the floating fish processing factory
with deep freezing capability and the stern ramp design used by the factory ships of the whaling
fleets of the 1930s. The result of this development was the stern-ramp factory freezer trawler. The
first ships of this type were built during the 1950s in the UK for Salvesen, a fishing company that
had close ties to the whaling industry. But the concept became most accepted only after the Soviet