FEATURE
FISH FARMING TECHNOLOGY #3 by Elihai Radzinski, Director, Fibras Industriales S.A.
An additional product we recommend for harsh conditions is the Polytar rope that is made of high tenacity polyester but at the same time coated with a tar solution developed by FISA that will work as a lubricant during maneuvering specially with the stretching of the rope in open sea conditions.
The benefits of abrasion and UV resistance nets Fibras Industriales S.A., commercially known as FISA has been around for over 70 years. Until the late 90s, the company focused mostly on the South American market with some sales to central and North America. The main reason for this was that until the millennium, Peru would fish around nine million tonnes per year and with Chile fishing an additional four million tonnes, the two countries alone represented around 15 percent of world fishing in terms of volume. As FISA had around 40 percent market share of those two countries together with some additional sales to Ecuador, Mexico and North America, the company had a market share above eight percent of world netting requirements and much higher for ocean fishing considering that until recently FISA only dealt with multifilament netting and not the monofilament introduced over the past five years. As always, times change and markets change, therefore over the past 20 years FISA has dedicated more and more resources for growth in the aquaculture industry on a global scale. The first stage was to divert existing knotless Raschel machines towards production for the Chile Salmon aquaculture market. As this market grew with extreme speed, it was within no time that FISA was obliged to invest in new machinery for this netting and with this extra capacity new markets were entered like the lake farmed tilapia in Honduras and Mexico and during the first years of the century, FISA started supplying rigged cages and bulk netting to European customers with tougher weather conditions such as The Canary Islands and Greece. Each time the company entered new markets, we learnt together with our customers the specific requirements for each market and developed new products that better suit each requirement. The biggest advantage FISA has over other netting manufacturers is that we have a complete range of products and not just Raschel Knotless netting. This means we can always innovate and adapt to each markets specific requirements.
FISA Polymax ropes
In The Canary Islands, there are very strong currents that cause the vertical ropes of the cages to rub with the structural cage. This leads to friction and abrasion of the rope. Apart from adding plastic hoses to the first 1.5 meters of the rope, we proposed to our customer the use of Polymax ropes instead of polypropylene or Polysteel. For those of you not familiar with the difference between these products, Polysteel is basically a mix of polyethylene and polypropylene (mixed at extrusion stage, not production of rope stage) thus 42 | July 2017 - International Aquafeed