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Geared for innovation: drive to increase safety, productivity spurs development of seagoing equipment.

Article Excerpt
For this year's focus on new fishing equipment, the spotlight is on three products that became available in January. There might seem to be too much of an emphasis on seining, but one of the products, the E-Stop safety switch for seine winches, is a much-needed device and has obvious applications for other types of fisheries. So let's start with the E-Stop switch.

Safety switch

Ask anyone who has ever gotten wrapped up with a line and hauled into a winch and they'll tell you it happens real fast. The only way to keep from getting mangled is for someone to quickly get to a shut-off switch. But the shut-off switch is often too far away for other crewmen to get to in time or to be reached by the person who's tangled up.

However, there appears to be an answer for that problem, at least for seiners. Emerald Marine Products in Seattle has a licensing agreement with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to manufacture, along with Kolstrand Marine Supply, the E-Stop emergency shut-off switch for purse seine deck winches.

The CDC'S National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's field station in Anchorage, Alaska, and NIOSH'S Spokane Research Laboratory in Spokane, Wash., developed the prototype for three purse seiners to test, after it was determined that fishermen on purse seiners were at a higher risk for machinery related injuries than were fishermen in other fisheries. The switches were tested over a two-year period.

Emerald Marine...

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