VESSEL REVIEW | Seraphim – Scottish owner adds prawn and groundfish twin-rigger to fleet

Family-owned Lighthouse Fishing Company of Peterhead, Scotland has expanded its east coast vessel fleet with the recent acquisition of a new twin-rig trawler built by Parkol Marine Engineering.

Seraphim was built to a design by Ian Paton of SC McAllister and Company for both single and twin rig trawling of prawns and groundfish. It can also operate as half of a pair trawler team if needed, providing greater flexibility for the owners.

The development of the new trawler was in fulfillment of the requirements of Lighthouse's owners, father and son fishers Andrew and Joshua Buchan. The brief from the customer called for a trawler with a fish handling system that can work with large hauls without any change in setup.

The 21.6- by 7.7-metre Seraphim has a round bilge steel hull, an aluminium wheelhouse, a transom stern, a bulbous bow, a soft nose stem, a full length shelter, and a fish hold with capacity for 700 boxes. Power is provided by a Mitsubishi S6R2-T2MPTAW3M 460kW engine driving an S&P Marine nozzle-housed, 2,600mm fixed-pitch propeller via a Masson Marine MMW7400 gearbox. Cummins meanwhile supplied a QSL9 engine for use with the hydraulic equipment and two 6BT5.9DM generators to provide electrical power for the onboard systems.

In the wheelhouse are NorSap crew seats and an electronics suite that consists of Furuno and Simrad echosounders, an Olex 3D mapper, two Koden radars, a Seafield Navigation plotter with AIS, and a Notus echo sensor for detecting prawn hotspots.

The fish handling system supplied by Seagate Fabrication includes a reception hopper, a hydraulically operated hatch, washing facilities, and conveyors for sorting, cutting, and waste disposal. The system has eight catch processing workstations, though the vessel's normal operating profile means the workstations can be manned by only five personnel. Also fitted are a Geneglace icemaker and a Premier Refrigeration fishroom refrigeration system.

The belowdeck area is subdivided by three watertight bulkheads into an aft accommodation space for up to eight crewmembers, the engine room, the fishroom, and a forepeak tank/bow thruster compartment. The main deck has an athwartships steel casing centered aft of midships for a galley, a mess, and a washroom. The side has a steel shelter and an integral gallow arrangement over the net drums.

Situated forward is a weathertight shelter space for fish handling and for housing a winch, which can be operated either manually or via a control panel in the wheelhouse. The shelter deck has a steel trawl gantry with crane and power block. The winches, the net drums, and the aft crane were provided by Thistle Marine, the nets and net discs are from Westbro Supplies, the warps and sweeps are from Karl Thomson, and RD Buchan and Sons supplied the trawl doors.