Marc d’Entremont and Angie Greene of Katchi, photographed on the harbour in Yarmouth, N.S, are helping reinvent trawling for better sustainability and costs.As a fourth-generation fisher in Yarmouth, N.S., Marc d’Entremont saw the sun setting on traditional trawling, a style of fishing his family had built their livelihood on.
So, he launched Katchi, a fishing tech startup. The company developed a precision harvesting system that ditches the trawl doors, instead using computer-controlled winches that dynamically move the net up and down the water column to catch targeted fish without touching the sea floor. Meanwhile, unmanned vessels on the surface scout for fish, delivering hydroacoustic data to the boat. It’s a more sustainable – both economically and ecologically – way to trawl.
Co-founder Aaron Stevenson came up with the idea in 2017, a catastrophic year for whale ensnarements. “You had 17 North Atlantic right whales that died that year,” he says. Joe Howlett, a volunteer disentangler from the Campobello Whale Rescue Team in New Brunswick also died that year while trying to disentangle a whale.
MOBI contains and coils a fisher’s line on the ocean floor until they return to collect their gear. It can be triggered acoustically from the vessel, sending the entire system and the cage to the surface for re-baiting. ATLAS is a suite of software and hardware that can report all sorts of useful data including the orientation of the traps and when they were last seen, reducing the problem of “ghost gear” on the ocean floor.
“ empower them to have timely and accurate fisheries management information that’s never been available to them before,” he says.
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