"Half of the farm's rainbow trout aged six months and weighing 300 grams sank with the cages," Nils Arve Eidsheim of the Loennoeykalven fish farm in Austevoll in southwestern Norway told AFP.

The trout were crushed to death on the seabed when the cages broke loose during the storm overnight Saturday to Sunday, he said.

"We had to fight all night to save our installations but the waves had the final say," Eidsheim said.

Another 150,000 trout escaped from the same fish farm, which is owned by Sjoetroll Havbruk.

"With the help of fishermen equipped with nets, we started to pick up (some of) the escaped fish. Several hundred a day since Sunday," Eidsheim said.

The Loennoeykalven fish farm lost about 300,000 of its 700,000 trout, a loss estimated at "several million kroner" (one million kroner = 120,000 euros or 156,000 dollars), he said.

High winds lashed Norway on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, moving east toward Sweden, Denmark and the Baltic states.

Off the Norwegian coast, a Cypriot vessel ran aground in the bad weather late Friday before breaking in two and sinking, leaking some 370 tonnes of oil into the water.

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