August 13, 2018 — Ashored Innovations, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, has joined the parade of companies focused on improving lobster fishing.
But Ashored isn’t looking to build a better lobster trap. Driven by new regulations to eliminate the entanglement threat to the North Atlantic right whale, Ashored is focused on developing a reliable, submersible buoy that goes down with the lobster trawl, is geo-trackable, and retrieved via acoustic release technology.
“We’re not reinventing the lobster trap. It’s the buoys we are redesigning,” CEO Aaron Stevenson told SeafoodSource.
After meetings with lobstermen, Stevenson and his partners realized replacing the current-style lobster trap “was going to be a losing battle against fishermen because the cost to replace them would be astronomical.”
“We initially had that notion, but shifted pretty quick to a smart buoy concept,” he said.
Stevenson said a major concern of fishermen about this new, non-visible technology involved not knowing where another fisherman’s traps and lines were and which direction they were laid. Fishermen didn’t want to lay their traps and lines on top of others – or have others on top of theirs.
Ross Arsenault, Ashored’s COO, said they are working to have “the ability to recognize that someone else’s buoys are there, but not recall them. You will only recall your own by using a proprietary signal or a security code.”
“[While] acoustic release technology has existed for a long while, we’re working to develop a modified one and have a few other release mechanisms as our active retrieval release,” Arsenault said. “But the acoustic element is the standard at the moment and we are experimenting with ways to adapt away from that to perhaps find cost savings for the fishermen.”
Theirs isn’t a one-buoy-fits-all solution. In recognition of the various types and depths of waters that lobstermen fish in, Ashored is developing four prototype buoys.