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Every year, between 500,000 and one million tonnes of fishing gear is lost at sea. Known as Abandoned, Lost or otherwise Discarded Fishing Gear (ALDFG), or “ghost gear”, this equipment keeps catching fish and entangling marine life long after it is lost, damages sensitive seabed habitats, and is estimated to account for around 10% of all plastic in the ocean. The cost of replacing lost gear alone is put at $2.6 billion a year — and in Europe, marine litter costs the EU fishing fleet approximately €61.7 million annually.
Recognising this challenge, Succorfish joined NETTAG+, a pan-European research and innovation programme funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe, with UK participation supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through Innovate UK. Working alongside Newcastle University, WWF and partners across seven countries, Succorfish designed, from the ground up, the world’s first acoustic ALDFG tag built for global commercial fisheries: MyGearTag™, powered by Succorfish’s proprietary Delphis® underwater acoustic communications technology.
MyGearTag™ is now a flagship example of collaborative European research being transformed into commercially proven technology — validated at sea, adopted by fishers and conservation groups, and featured on national television.
NETTAG+ is a €2.7 million, three-year Horizon Europe project (Grant No. 101112812) contributing to the European Commission Mission “Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030”. Coordinated by CIIMAR (Portugal), it brings together 15 partners from seven countries: research institutions including Newcastle University, INESC TEC, the University of Santiago de Compostela and the University of Aveiro; environmental NGOs including WWF Mediterranean, WWF Italy and WWF Adria; fisheries organisations and port authorities in Spain, Portugal and Italy; the Maltese fisheries ministry; and technology companies including Succorfish. UK partners Newcastle University and Succorfish are funded by UKRI under the UK’s association to Horizon Europe (Grant No. 10066822).
The project develops three complementary solutions:
Crucially, commercial fishers were involved throughout, with solutions co-designed, tested and demonstrated under real conditions in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Croatia, Malta and the United Kingdom.
Once fishing gear sinks beneath the surface, GPS and satellite technologies stop working. For decades, finding lost gear meant relying on estimated positions, costly search operations, or simply accepting the loss. Gear can disappear for any number of reasons — bad weather, strong tides, or being accidentally dragged away by another vessel’s gear — and unless its owner knows where it has gone, it can be almost impossible to find again.
The consequences are severe: continuous “ghost fishing” of fish, shellfish and marine mammals; plastic and chemical pollution as gear degrades; damage to seabed habitats; and direct financial loss and reduced efficiency for fishers. The EU reported in 2018 that at least 20% of EU fishing gear is lost or discarded at sea, totalling up to 11,000 tonnes.
Existing underwater tracking systems were built for oil and gas or defence budgets — too expensive, too complex and too power-hungry for everyday fishing operations. Through NETTAG+ workshops and sea trials, fishers, scientists, fisheries managers and conservation organisations consistently defined what was needed: a gear location system that is affordable, easy to deploy, reliable, long-life, effective over long underwater distances, and practical for routine commercial fishing.
Succorfish engineered MyGearTag™ around Delphis®, its proprietary underwater acoustic modem technology, designed from the ground up for long-range, ultra-low-power digital communication underwater. Unlike conventional acoustic “pingers” that transmit continuously, a MyGearTag™ stays silent until actively interrogated — dramatically reducing noise disturbance to the marine environment.
Products used in the MyGearTag™ system:
Key capabilities:
In short: Delphis® is the engine; MyGearTag™ is the complete fisheries solution built around it. MyGearTag™ is the first commercial application of the wider Delphis platform, which also serves defence, offshore energy, scientific research and subsea infrastructure markets.
Development followed an intensive cycle of laboratory work, engineering trials and real-world deployments, with hardware and software continuously refined against direct feedback from working fishers across the NETTAG+ demonstration sites in the UK, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Croatia and Malta.
Two milestone trials took place in the North Sea aboard Newcastle University’s research vessel RV Princess Royal. The first was an extensive programme of range testing, confirming detection out to a maximum horizontal range of 2.7 km and proving the system could find lost gear across a wide search area. The second exercised pre-production tags, the Surface Locator Unit and the app in mock recovery operations: two items of simulated lost gear were pinpointed from starting positions over 2 km away in a matter of minutes, allowing the skipper to navigate to within metres of their true position. Further trials followed in the Arabian Sea.
MyGearTag™ was launched commercially at the Scottish Skipper Expo in Aberdeen in May 2024, and within NETTAG+ the system was matured to Technology Readiness Level 9 — fully validated for routine fishing operations, with no specialist expertise required.
MyGearTag™ proves something bigger than gear recovery: that low-cost, low-noise underwater acoustic communication can become foundational technology across the blue economy. Within NETTAG+, MyGearTag tags are also interrogated by IRIS, a robotic subsea recovery vehicle developed by consortium partner INESC TEC, enabling end-to-end location and retrieval even where recovery exceeds the practical limits of a fishing vessel.
The same Delphis platform that powers MyGearTag™ is now being applied across sustainable fisheries, marine conservation, offshore renewable energy, defence and maritime security, scientific research, autonomous underwater vehicles, environmental monitoring and subsea infrastructure. Delphis enables real-time communication and data transfer between divers, underwater vehicles and subsea instruments, and has been demonstrated in action with the Swedish Maritime Robotics Centre (SMaRC) at its Äskö test site — connecting the underwater world well beyond fisheries — supporting Succorfish’s wider Seabed-to-Space™ vision of connected marine monitoring. The SC2 surface gateway is the backbone of this over-the-horizon solution, linking Delphis acoustic devices on the seabed to cellular and satellite networks above the surface — so subsea data can reach any location on earth in real time.
As regulators worldwide sharpen requirements on gear marking, ghost gear and sustainable fisheries, MyGearTag™ gives the industry a practical way to meet those obligations while cutting its own losses.
MyGearTag™ delivers value to any organisation that manages, protects or operates in the marine environment:
SC2 tracks vessels and provides connectivity above the surface; MyGearTag™, powered by Delphis, locates gear below it. Together they underpin Succorfish’s Seabed-to-Space™ monitoring vision.
Succorfish’s established satellite and cellular platform, proven as a highly reliable vessel monitoring system across UK inshore fleets. As a surface gateway, SC2 is the backbone of Succorfish’s Seabed-to-Space™ over-the-horizon solution: it bridges underwater acoustic data from Delphis-enabled devices to cellular and satellite networks, delivering subsea data anywhere in the world in real-time.
Succorfish’s proprietary underwater acoustic modem technology, developed with Newcastle University’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering: ultra-low-power, short-burst digital communication exchanging data packets between up to 256 uniquely addressable units, with sub-metre “ping” ranging precision, a range of up to 3.5 km and depth rating beyond 350 m. A platform, not a consumer product — already used by research institutes worldwide across oceanography, marine biology and subsea engineering.
MyGearTag™ is a product brand built on Succorfish Delphis® technology. MyGearTag™ is the first complete, commercial and fisher-friendly solution for locating fishing gear below the water. It is a complete system including tag, surface locator unit and app – all powered by Succorfish. Visit the MyGearTag™ website for more information.
Succorfish engineers industry leading subsea communication and monitoring technology, and the software to deploy a full solution that connects all your assets underwater with everything above.
