The commercial fishing industry now has the ability to find lost fishing gear with precision and accuracy, saving thousands in equipment replacement costs, while helping to protect the ocean from ghost fishing.
Ten years in the making, MyGearTag was launched by U.K.-based Succorfish at the Scottish Skipper Expo in 2024, and has since been tested in Canadian waters and is now on the market.
An underwater acoustic location device, the plastic tags, equipped with state-of-the-art acoustic Delphis technology, are manufactured from recycled fishing nets. The tags are attached to each end of a string of fishing gear and once set, sends a ping to the boat so fishermen know where their gear is up to a three-kilometre range.
Before, all fishermen could do to find lost gear was to drag a grapple for it, said Chad Hooper, Succorfish CEO and founder. “Now we can offer some precision and accuracy for that activity.”
Hooper said Succorfish trialed the MyGearTag last fall with three or four different skippers in Nova Scotia. “We recovered some lost gear successfully. The gear was 2.7 km from where the vessel was located.”
Contributed photos.
Hooper also travelled to New Brunswick, meeting with future distributor Austin Vibert, CEO for Ghost Gear Disappear Inc. (www.ghostgeardisappear.com) and visited 10 fishing ports during the trip.
Hooper was back in New Brunswick in February as a panelist for the second International Fishing Gear Innovation Summit, held Feb. 25 and 26 in Moncton.
Succorfish, based in North Shields, a fishing port in the northern U.K., started in 2008 with the launch of GIGO (Gear In, Gear Out) beacons that provide a highly efficient, ergonomically designed solution for autonomous monitoring of fishing activities.
“Most of our staff have worked in the fishing industry since they were kids. Their parents, their grandparents. We’re kind of a legacy fishing business, but in the technology sector,” said Hooper.
Around 2015, Succor began working on subsea technology which led to the development of MyGearTag.
“Fishing equipment can be lost for any number of reasons, such as bad weather or being accidentally dragged away by other boats’ gear. Unless its owners know where it’s gone, it can be almost impossible to find it again. MyGearTag allows for lost fishing nets, pots and traps to be quickly located over a wide area, thus avoiding the substantial cost of replacing them and reducing the amount of plastic in our oceans,” said Hooper.
An estimated 46 per cent of the plastic in the world’s oceans comes from lost or discarded fishing gear, contributing to the approximately 13,000 pieces of plastic litter per square kilometre of ocean. The financial cost to the fishing industry is also staggering, with between half a million and one million tonnes of fishing gear lost at sea annually, amounting to around $2.6 billion.
