Well 4 days to be exact! Yes, the wanderers have returned from yet another successful show in Brussels. We thoroughly enjoy our time in Brussels, as it gives us a chance to meet with potential customers as well as allowing us to spend time with our current ones. We had some very useful feedback from our customers regarding their results from the mackerel season and also enjoyed discussed the forthcoming herring season with them.

We have now come to the end of very successful herring and mackerel season, with raw material supplies more than exceeding our expectations. Demand has been much higher than in previous years, so our sales team have been kept busy with negotiating sales and arranging delivery of goods.

Well things continue to be busy here at Shetland Catch. Not only are we still producing mackerel we have now started to produce Atlanto Scandia Herring.

Mackerel production has been steady throughout January and into February. We have had several good landings from the local boats, our Scottish suppliers and have had some very good landings from our Irish suppliers. Production has more than exceeded our expectations.

We still continue to get landings of mackerel from the Altaire and Enterprise, who are fishing off the South West coast of Ireland. Average size of mackerel started off at 450g to 500g average but has decreased slightly to 420g to 440g.

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.

Yes, indeed it is! Another Christmas is just around the corner. We're getting quite excited about Christmas here in the office. We have some nice decorations up and the Canteen is doing a special Christmas lunch for us on the 18th December and then Thursday 20th is our staff Christmas party, which will be at the Royal British Legion again. We're having a cold buffet this year and will be dancing the night away to Charlie's Golden Oldies. It should be a good night out.

This year, the factory and office will be closed for the duration of the festive period. We will close at 5pm on Christmas Eve and will re-open on 3rd January 2008.

Every year, Shetland Catch has a dedicated donation and sponsorship budget. We endeavour to support as many local events and charities as possible within our remit. For the past three years, we have been the proud sponsors of the Shetland Rugby Club. As a result of this, we were invited to the Rugby Club Christmas Dinner dance. Jolene and Norma from the sales and marketing team attended and had a thoroughly good evening with lots of nice food, drink and company. Unfortunately, we will no longer be continuing the sponsorship but we would like to take this opportunity to thank the Shetland Rugby Club for the invite and wish them all the best in finding a new sponsor.

Well, just when we thought we had come to the end of our mackerel season, we got a surprise visit from the Faroese vessel, Christian i Grotinum, with some 455g average mackerel! This was a very welcome addition to an already successful season.

Our autumn mackerel season has lasted a few days longer than expected. We have been very pleased with the results in October, with a higher than expected volume of top quality fish to process.

The factory has maintained full production since our season began on 4th October, with a landing from the King's Cross. We processed all her mackerel quota as well as the majority of the Shetland quota. We also secured the majority of the mackerel from another of our Scottish suppliers, Enterprise. Towards the end of the season we had regular landings from Irish vessels such as Western Viking, Western Chieftain & Western Endeavour.

Our herring season has now drawn a final landing of herring from the Shetland registered Research. All the Shetland boats have now finished their quotas and we have been very pleased that nearly all have landed their catches here at Shetland Catch. Our total amount of raw material has exceeded our projected expectations.

The average size over the herring season has ranged from 230g at the start of the season and has been about 300g towards the end of the season. The remaining few weeks of the season, the herring has been full of roe, caught mainly in the fishing grounds south of Fair Isle.

Shipping has been extremely busy over the past few weeks. We have had a couple of reefer boats in loading fish for customers in Africa and have also had other boats in loading fish to take to our cold stores throughout Europe, in easy reach for our other customers.