Port Director Rólant Højsted:
Most of our port business is represented by [Bakkafrost-owned fishmeal and salmon feed factory] Havsbrún. They receive ship calls every single day.
For instance, they distribute salmon feed around the country by sea and by road, and also they import additives for [the production of] fish meal and marine oil. Also they export some fish meal and marine oil.
And then there’s [cold storage facility] Bergfrost, by order of location. They receive goods from [next-door neighbor, freezing plant] Pelagos amongst others, and vessels land frozen fish there for cold storage. There is quite a lot of business activity.
Then there’s Pelagos, a whole lot of fishing vessels calling there. Throughout the entire [pelagic catch] season, maybe 3 or 4 months out of the year, they receive ship calls on a daily basis.
In the same area there you’ve got all these foreign and Faroese vessels calling for bunkering service [at Effo Bunkers] — and there’s quite many of them.
There are also vessels calling at Vónin to have their trawl nets delivered or repaired or for doing any other business relating to their fishing gear.
Then we’ve got [mechanical engineers] KJ, [electrical engineers] Petur Larsen, and other service providers, where vessels receive maintenance and repairs.
Our plan is to add another 80 meters of quayside, “northward” as they say in Fuglafjørður, actually southward, next to where the bunker facility is located and further along, which will enable us to manage an additional harbor function simultaneously.
Because there are many ships calling at Bergfrost, Pelagos and for bunkering. But that’s just three harbor functions at the same time.
So if marine oil is landed there also… It gets rather crowded as thing are, sometimes vessels will have to wait either for bunkering or for landing their catch, or for loading or unloading [frozen fish].
But if we get those additional 80 meters of quay in this particular area, we can more easily serve all the vessels at the same time, even on the more busy days.
Besides, we’ll be able to receive more ship traffic for bunkering because currently quite a few vessels pass by and we have to decline many calls, simply because our docking capacity is insufficient at the moment.
So I think this will likely increase ship traffic at the port.
Here’s plenty of traffic — about 1,000 ship calls a year in the last few years.
They [Havsbrún] are already shipping feed down to Scotland on a weekly basis. All of that contributes to increasing our total throughput tonnage, both outgoing and incoming.
Well, I’m not sure whether all final decisions have been made at this point but they likely are; in any case I hope and expect that [Havsbrún’s new docking and storage area] will be completed to commence operations next year.
The Feed Terminal will be extended by another 70 meters and they are doing land reclamation to make room for more batteries of storage silos.
So this will significantly increase the harbor area, both here [around Havsbrún] and out there [between Effo Bunkers and Vónin].
The [Bakkafrost/Havsbrún] investment is very large [an estimate 500 million DKK (67 million EUR) over a few years].
Starting in January, the pelagic vessels would normally go fishing for mackerel down at around Shetland, but that’s not possible right now.
Yet they were lucky to get a decent capelin quota in Iceland instead.
So that was landed in January or February this year. And then the blue whiting fishery continues until about May-June, and then there’s a break.
But this year they started early on the mackerel fishery. Now it’s more like [the pelagic fishing and related port business] is taking place almost throughout the entire year, so I expect it’ll keep going up until Christmas at full throttle.
So we’ll get another 80 meters of quay with high depths alongside, all the way down to beyond 20 meters. We’ll have a stretch of quay there spanning about a hundred meters with depths alongside between 14-15 down to 20 meters. As for the remaining quaysides [of the main harbor area] there’s about 12-13 meters of depth alongside.
I don’t think you have the equivalent anywhere else around here, in the Nordic Seas area.
The largest ship that we’ve had in the port to date was some 240 meters in length. We’ve had several vessels of about and above 200 meters. And that’s no problem, as long as the weather behaves.
