Weekend video: 40 days chasing cod in the Barents Sea
The Berlin is one of Europe’s most advanced factory trawlers, down to the sensors on its fishing gear and a hot tub that never quite works. DW Documentary follows the Cuxhaven-based ship and its 33-man crew from Tromsø to the cod grounds south of Bear Island, where they fish and process the catch eight hours on, eight off, every day of the trip.
Base pay is modest and the real money is a share of the catch, so when an electrical fault idles the onboard factory for nearly seven hours, the whole crew feels it. Meanwhile Tim Schorr, the scientific observer gathering data for next year’s quotas, has a toothache that can’t wait for port. Getting him off the ship means riding out a storm first, then a lifeboat and a rope ladder.
Just under an hour on one of the Arctic’s hardest jobs, and why the men keep going back.
