Irish Skipper Expo
INFOMAR attended the Irish Skipper Expo held in University of Limerick on March 25th and 26th. The Expo, returning after a two-year hiatus, is a well-established platform for bringing together Ireland’s fishing community and the many companies and businesses that support it. The well-attended event showcased an array of products and services including boats, engines, safety gear, general chandlerys, nets and marine electronics including chart plotter systems.
The fishing industry is one which stands to gain significant benefits from high resolution seabed data and this event was an important opportunity to meet our key stakeholders and support the blue economy. INFOMAR maps key sensitive habitats including nursery grounds and spawning sites of commercially important fish stocks, contributing to their protection and sustainable management. Physical seabed data helps to reduce loss of fishing gear and improves the efficiency of fishing activity. It allows quotas to be achieved while reducing fishing effort and minimising the impact on the seabed.
This year we were happy to promote the recent publication of a ‘How to Guide’ that will enable fishers to access and view our bathymetric data through onboard chart-plotters. The guide, ‘Improving accessibility of INFOMAR data to fishers’ and available as a free download, details step-by-step instructions on how to import seabed data from an area of interest. The instructions are relevant to both Olex and TimeZero plotters, two of the most widely used softwares in the industry. It is intended as a self-service guide whereby individual fishers can help themselves depending on individual user needs. Some experience working with mapping softwares would be beneficial or alternatively please contact John O’Mahony from Belco Marine, who helped produce the report and can provide assistance in importing data. Please also reach out to us if you have any questions about this on info [at] infomar.ie.
In addition, INFOMAR seabed data appears in a number of other commercial plotters available to the industry including Navionics and Turbo Winsuite of plotters (formerly Sodena) which can be purchased over the counter in Ireland from Barry Electronics and Belco Marine. The TurboWin line of products, produced and licensed by Seafield Navigation is underpinned by a number of Bathymetric datasets of which INFOMAR is one.
John O’Mahony from Belco Marine said ‘It’s great to see how technology has benefitted this area, 15 years ago you could only follow tracks on 2d charts but now you can really appreciate and see how much the seabed changes underneath the boat’.