Flying to the Loophole Banks in the Barents'Sea, we're contemplating here on the starboard a proud and imposing building, trailing in its wake a multitude of birds, albatross, petrels, seagulls, obvious testimony of her occupation in progress.

Kerguelen de Trémarec - KDT - has just raised a net of a few tons of toothfish and her factories are in full activity. The fish is there successively beheaded, emptied, threaded, peeled, weighted and frozen, then be conditioned, packed up, ringed and stored in the freezing deck. The major part of the production is intended for the Japanese market to be consumed to some extent under the form of sachimi, or crude fish, with the example of the carpaccios. The sanitary standards in this respect are extremely rigorous. The remainder will be marketed by the sign Intermarché, ship-owner of the KDT.

Kerguelen de Trémarec also followed the propaedeutics of the Great North. Leaving an Italian shipyard in 1974, it is brought to sail under the name of Commandant Gué in Newfoundland, in Greenland, in the Barents'sea, before being repurchased by Intermarché in 1992, as her flag to bowsprit with the colors of the musketeers testifies. Repatriated to Concarneau(Britanny - France) on the 1st of January 1993, renamed Kerguelen de Trémarec in remembrance of the discoverer of the islands of the same name, the trawler leaves the french metropolitan waters on August 20, 1993 in order to operate in the southern seas. With her 87m long and 13m broad, Kerguelen is the largest French trawler - that goes from oneself when one bears such a name -. Registered in the French Antarctic Territory, she is able, thanks to her two engines MAK and her propeller with variable step, to move with full load 3065 tons! :-)