Iceland

Polar Fishing Gear

Polar Fishing Gear is an innovated company specialized in design, manufacturing and sale of high efficient trawl doors suitable for all trawl fishing, demersal fishing, semi-pelagic “off the seabed” fishing and pelagic fishing.

Atli Mar Josafatsson has been involved in trawl doors building, developing, sales and marketing of trawl doors for more than 40 years, first at the family company J. Hinriksson with its well known Poly-Ice trawl doors and since 2006 with his own brand.

Starting in late sixties, when trawl doors where made from wood with steel frames to the process of all steel doors in mid seventies, J. Hinriksson was the leading company in hydrodynamic design of trawl doors, lead by Atli in end of 1992 in co-operation with Engineering Faculty of the University of Iceland developed the Poly-Ice doors,

The main object in design and developing process of Polar trawl doors was efficiency, to obtain as good spreading force know by best trawl doors makers on the market but more importantly, to achieve less resistance. With computer simulations, several trips to Flume Tank testing and modification after actual fishing trial backed up with experienced friends and skippers, Polar trawl doors high spreading force and reduced spreading force has been confirmed.

Polar doors are widely used with “off the seabed” rigging where the trawl doors are guided off the bottom during towing a bottom trawl where client can chose from Hercules 1,2r and Hercules 1,5r, Mercury 2,0r and Mercury 2,4r, Jupiter 2,7r, Thor 1,2r and 1,6r, Tyr 2,0r and Tyr 2,4r semi-pelagic trawl doors.

Apart from Polar’s traditional trawl doors made from single curved plates with one, two or three slots, trawl doors made from aerodynamically designed wings were launched in 2007. Mercury hw and Jupiter hw has a aerodynamically shaped main body, constructed from an inner plate forming the inside part of the wing shaped body and an outer plate forming the outer part of the wing shaped body. Polar’s hydro wings models are widely used in the southern hemisphere in Chile, Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand but more than 200 pairs have been sold.

Polar recent development, the POSEIDON remotely controllable trawl doors is taking the last steps to commercialisation. The POSEIDON trawl doors are also constructed from the aerodynamically shaped wings.