History

Peter Mair has been an engineer for 35 years, and has loved fishing and collecting shellfish for longer. For the last 15 years he has owned and run Universal Engineering Services Ltd in Clevedon Auckland, and when it came to getting scallops, he started off using an old fashioned box type dredge. However Peter found that this was hard to keep on the sea floor, caught more rubbish than scallops and was very heavy to pull up from the sea floor by hand. Needless to say this resulted in a very sore back, sore hands, a lot of frustration and not a lot of scallops! Peter reckoned there had to be a better way!

Peter realised that Foil type dredges had been used for many many years, and had been proven to be far more efficient. However there were things that needed to change, such as:

1. These dredges are often big and bulky, which makes them hard to store onboard your boat and dangerous if you should happen to fall on one in rough seas.
2. These dredges have a tendency to flip upside down unless you are very careful lowering it to the sea floor.
3. Raising the dredges was still either by hand or by going back over the dredge, to roll it over and plane it to the surface. In Peter’s opinion, the latter was not an option because of the risk of fouling your tow rope with your propeller.

So with all of this in mind, Peter (and his wife Lichelle) decided to design a foil type dredge of their own. There were certain criteria it had to meet:

1. The dredge had to be collapsible for both safety and ease of storage onboard the boat.
2. They wanted to eliminate all that heavy chain associated with other dredges.
3. It had to land the right way up on the sea floor every time with no fuss
4. They wanted a self surfacing dredge that took the back-breaking work out of retrieving your catch, and that could be raised to the surface safely in the same direction in which you were dredging.

So, that is why they designed their unique bridle release mechanism. This allows you to plane the dredge to the surface to retrieve your catch. They also designed a rope clamp that (when attached to a float) is used to keep the dredge at the surface once you stop your boat. (The rope clamp can also be used as a deep water anchor retriever and can be purchased separately.)

After quite a number of various designs and countless tests on the water Peter finally perfected the STOWAWAY scallop dredge. Due to the uniqueness of the design and functionality of the scallop dredge they decided to take out patent protection and then make it available to the recreational boaties as there is nothing else available like the STOWAWAY in the market place. Since STOWAWAY has been available to the public it has proven to be extremely popular and Saltymate now have dredges throughout the North and South Island.