We deliver the freshest and most delicious tuna from Ryoueimaru, our longline fishing vessel.
The warm water currents off the coast of Owase have a long history of being a favorable fishing location, long known as as a popular place to catch Tuna. However, longline fishing or round haul seine fishing has been declining.
“Let’s return Tuna to Owase and make Owase powerful again.”
With this hope, we built our vessel, Ryoeimaru with the aim to create a new generation of fishermen and revive "Owase" as a town of fishing.
These are the fittings of Ryoueimaru.
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We built Ryoeimaru as our longline fishing boat for tuna in June of 2013.
Depending on the season, it sets sail to fish in the open seas to the East, central Southern areas, Ogasawara, and nearby coastal fishing areas depending on the seasons. We catch mainly Albacore Tuna, but also Bigeye Tuna, Yellowfin Tuna, and various varieties of marlin.
We employ special countermeasures to process the fish while on the boat, removing gills and intestines, in order to ensure the highest level of freshness, special care which is not done by other companies.
Ryoeimaru is also outfitted with thickly insulated walls in its hold in order to keep the water temperature in it stable. Additionally, our crews carefully monitor the temperature both mechanically and visually to ensure optimum water quality and conditions.
Once it sails out, the ship will not come back for about two to four weeks. This means we need to keep the fish as fresh as possible, so the crews are concentrating day and night.
In the Summer of 2017, we plan to launch another ship of the same style. Our system to supply customers high quality and delicious tuna will be ready.
Lately, longline fishing has been on the decline in Japan, but we are trying to use it as a focus to strengthen our fishing supply chain.
Tough times bring opportunity.
Longline fishing uses a device with one main line, with many branching lines attached to numerous hooks.
We spend half a day dispersing the lines, recovering them during the next half of the day, removing the fish, one by one, so there is no unnecessary pain inflicted on the fish, and they are retrieved fresh. This is the benefit of this type of fishery.
Longline fishing boats are mainly 19t type ship, but only 200 of these ships are working in Japan.
Working on these ships is very tough, but most of boatmen are about 60 years old. “The Fisherman is undergoing an extinction crisis.”--Seeing this situation, we decided to commence this longline fishing project.
※漁場図
