Well that's us into 2008 now and we hope it will be a great year for everyone.

Despite almost being blown away in Shetland over the past week, the season is now underway here at the factory. We are well into production of winter mackerel. We saw our first landing on the 4th January by the Irish registered Voyager. Since then we have several landings from our Scottish suppliers: Resolute, Ocean Venture, King's Cross, Enterprise and Forever Grateful. There has been a landing from one of our local pelagic boats, Adenia.

The Research, Antarctic and Charisma have now left Shetland to head out to the fishing grounds which is currently about 6-12 hours west of Shetland. This means that we are the closest factory for boats that are landing. A few other Irish boats are also on the grounds at the moment, and we expect to see them in landing over the next few days. The remainder of the Shetland fleet will be heading off soon so we hope to see plenty more fish coming into the factory.

The average size of fish started off about 450g to 500g average but the recent landings the fish has been slightly smaller at 420g to 440g average.

With the production being busy, this in turn keeps our sales team busy selling fish, preparing documents and shipping the fish out as fast as we can produce it. We have a few shipments lined up for the next couple of weeks, in order to put fish into our interim coldstores in Poland and Lithuania. If anyone would be interested in purchasing any of the fish that we currently have in stock then please contact a member of the sales team:sales@shetlandcatch.com.

Congratulations to Catherine Hawick and her partner Ivan on the birth of their baby boy James Andrew, who was born on 21st December. Who could have asked for a better Christmas present? :)!