"Speed up production, quality and quantity! Strive to obtain greater benefits during the period of strategic opportunities and inject more nutrients into the growth of the Republic! When boarding a southbound refrigerated ship, Zhang Yun, vice president of the South China Sea Fishery Company, still had in his mind the imposing speeches of the CEOs at the previous company meeting.

"The Dutch West India Company came to order a large quantity of salted fish, and it was a good thing and a pressure for us to hear that the New England fishing boats that we used to export to them had disappeared." Zhang Yun sighed, the total fishery output of the East Coast (excluding the Southern Railway Company and excluding whale meat) last year was only more than 5,000 tons, which is still insufficient for personal use, let alone mouthful. To solve this contradiction, we can only increase production, and there is no second way.

Fortunately, this year, the South China Sea Fisheries Company has launched two new whaling vessels, four cod fishing vessels, four squid fishing vessels, two offshore trawlers and one processing/transport vessel. The launch of these vessels should more or less take the company's fishing production to a new level – with the addition of these new vessels, the company will have a total tonnage of 26,100 tonnes of fishing vessels (including processing vessels) and employ 1,267 people, making it a veritable trust in the East Coast fishing industry.

According to the regulations, each of these fishing boats is overstaffed by twice the staff, and over the long term, it can train more than 1,500 skilled sailors for the country every year. Some of these people have entered the inland waterway transportation company, some have entered the South China Sea transportation company, some have entered the navy, some have entered the immigration fleet exclusive to the Ministry of Immigration, and of course, some have been digested by the South China Sea Fishery Company.

For example, the refrigerated ship that Zhang Yun is riding on now. It's a new one this year. Its sailors were also trained before. The tonnage of this sailing ship is no more than 300 tons. It has a large and uniquely designed refrigerator that can refrigerate more than 160 Rust seafood. However, because the production of ether on the east coast is not high enough, and the freezer is still a novelty, the cost of refrigeration is high, and generally this kind of ship is not used for non-long-distance transportation.

Today, however, refrigerated ships are needed to export seafood, meat, and other commodities to places such as Dutch Brazil (the Dutch West African colonies were supplied by the river port in South Africa). Otherwise, even the salted fish will deteriorate with a certain amount of dù as it passes near the equator, which is obviously unacceptable to the customer - fortunately, the Dutch are willing to pay 50 guilders per raste for this freight. The cost recovery was more than enough, so the South China Sea Transportation Company ordered several refrigerated ships, intending to make a show of its strength to transport meat and fish from the east coast to distant places for sale.

The refrigerated ship docked at the exclusive fishery wharf of Yancheng Port at more than 10 o'clock in the morning. At this time, in addition to the ships of the South China Sea Transportation Company and the South China Sea Fishery Company, there were also seven or eight large and small Galen sailing ships in the port, which seemed to have undergone some simple repairs and refurbishments, and their appearance was different from before, but in the eyes of a veteran sailing man like Zhang Yun, he knew at a glance that these were foreign merchant ships that had been privately plundered back by the navy.

It seems that it is in a secluded corner of Yancheng Port. It seems that another stolen goods sale conference is being held!

Two new offshore trawlers from the South China Sea Fisheries Company are making final preparations before sailing. This type of sail trawler, which is not very common on the east coast, uses steam-powered anchor lifting and pulling winch. It makes it faster and more convenient to start the network. And this, apparently, also created conditions for fishing boats to use longer ropes and larger trawls.

Among the few sail-powered trawlers in the Blackwater region on the east coast, a truss trawl originated in Europe at this time, which had the advantage of not being affected by the speed of the vessel in the shape of the seabed - this was more important for sail-powered fishing vessels, and the net truss was only about ten meters long, and the size of the trawl was severely limited, so it was less efficient.

If the Blackwater region were not close to the world's largest fishing grounds, and there were more demersal fish, shrimp and crabs off the coast of Sakhalin, their trawlers would have caught a lot of fish, far less than they could have been modified to chase and catch pelagic fish during the flood season.

The new offshore trawler on the east coast uses a steam sail hybrid and the netting has been renovated – this time using a net-plate trawl. This kind of trawl is fixed with a large net plate at both ends of the net mouth, and the upper edge of the net is kept open with a row of floats, and the net plate is moved to both sides under the action of the steady drag force of the fishing boat, so that the net mouth is wide open. Theoretically, the size of the trawl depends only on the power of the fishing vessel, that is, the more dynamic the fishing vessel, the larger the trawl can be made, and the more efficient the fishing will be.

It is worth mentioning that at this time, Europe actually had the concept of this kind of net plate trawl prototype, but due to various reasons, their innovation was not recognized by fishermen, so this type of trawl gradually disappeared into invisibility. However, after a Scotsman who immigrated to the East Coast provided the trawl type he had seen as a child, the South China Sea Fishing Company took it very seriously, and immediately organized a special person to develop it, and finalized it, and then applied for a patent in the name of the company.

The newly designed patented fishing net uses sisal fiber produced by many sisal plantations in New China, which has good hardness and flexibility, and is also resistant to seawater corrosion, which is a very good industrial and fishery fiber, and is also one of the important export commodities in New China today.

After having lunch at the branch of the Yancheng Port Company, Zhang Yun met with several captains, encouraged them, and then boarded a processing ship and went out to sea with several fishing boats. Their fishing grounds are still located in the south-east waters of Yancheng Port, where the resources of slippery fish and hake are still relatively abundant, while the main targets of the trawlers of the people on the east coast are the bottom cod in the area, such as pollock and hake.

These cod live in the cold water of the bottom, and live in groups, and the people on the east coast originally used cod fishing boats to fish, which was less efficient. With these trawlers, it is believed that the domestic cod production on the east coast will definitely increase a peak in a short period of time.

In fact, after a few days at sea, perhaps because the new fishing boat was indeed more powerful, or perhaps because Zhang Yun, the leader of the company that accompanied the ship's research, supervised the formation, the two trawlers quickly found a place with relatively rich cod resources, and set up nets to catch a large number of pollock, the most common cod in the country on the east coast.

The catch was quickly sent to Zhang's processing ship, which also has a cold room on the new 500-plus tonnage ship. The refrigerated room is refrigerated by several ether freezers at the same time, and the caught fish are immediately sent to a freezer filled with ice brine in the refrigerated chamber after processing, and the cold brine is pumped out after the fish are frozen. Such fish can be kept in the refrigerator for a long time without fear of spoilage, which undoubtedly greatly prolongs the time of fishing boats at sea and improves work efficiency.

In the past, when there were no refrigerated processing ships, every time the people on the east coast caught fish, they could only process it quickly - mainly because the fish skin and intestines had a large number of bacteria, and as long as the temperature was a few degrees above zero, the bacteria would multiply rapidly, such as the cod caught by the people on the east coast, when it was 5 °C, it would rot after three or four days; This is the difference if the cod has been processed (gutted and dried) and can still be eaten at room temperature for many weeks due to the low number of bacteria.

This time, I went to the fishing ground to fish, and the freezing temperature of the refrigerated processing ship was set to zero degrees. The reason for this temperature is that the South China Sea Fishery Company has done a good job: fresh cod can be left for at least 16 days before spoiling at zero temperatures. This is long enough time for refrigerated processing ships to send the caught fish to Yancheng Port (which is stored in an underground ice cellar) and back and forth two or three times. Therefore, in order to save costs, the refrigerated processing vessels that go out are all kept at zero degrees Celsius for the seafood they catch.

Zhang Yun stayed on the refrigerated processing boat for a week, and six or seven nearby cod fishing boats, squid fishing boats, and two offshore trawlers successively brought more than 70 tons of various seafood products to the ship, most of which were pollock and Argentine slippery fish, but also some relatively rare hake, barramundi, various flounder, pomfret and pomfret fish, which made Zhang Yun a few happy to see - don't look at the small number of these fish in the latter species, but the price on the east coast is really expensive. Many wealthy people are not hesitant to spend a lot of money to buy and eat, and the market prospect is very bright.

"The fish sold to the Dutch are mostly pollock and squid. But I guess those people are only willing to want cod, and they don't want slippery fish, which is really ...... Gee. Zhang Yun looked at the warehouse full of cod, and began to think about the business in his mind: "I don't know if the Netherlands will want us to export the fish to them, it is estimated that it is very possible." Aren't they being locked down by the British, and they have to ask us to buy meat and fish, and they have to deliver them to our doors. On the other hand, this is not a bad thing, because the Government Council should approve the company's request to further expand the size of the fishing fleet, spurred by strong external demand, which is a great thing both for the number of sailors and for the increase in fisheries production. Our country should be founded on seafaring, and the basis of seafaring is to expand the size of the fishing fleet, after all, fishing is the cradle and foundation of all navigational undertakings......"

"Strive to double the size of the fishing fleet and whaling fleet next year, and the size of the ocean-going shipping fleet of the South China Sea Transportation Company is likely to be expanded. Zhang Yun pondered. (To be continued......) R1292