Rising fuel prices have been inflating the operating costs of the fishing industry. Trawl doors are used to hold the fishing net open during trawling operations, and they have a great influence on the fuel consumption of vessels. Improvements in the design of trawl doors could therefore contribute significantly to increased fuel efficiency. An efficient optimization algorithm using two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models is presented. Accurate CFD models, especially 3D, are computationally expensive. The direct use of traditional optimization algorithms, which often require a large number of evaluations, can therefore be prohibitive. The proposed method is iterative and uses low-order local response surface approximation models as surrogates for the expensive CFD model to reduce the number of iterations. The algorithm is applied to the design of two types of geometries: a typical modern trawl door, and a novel airfoil-shaped trawl door. The results from the 2D design optimization show that the hydrodynamic efficiency of the typical modern trawl door could be increased by 32%, and the novel airfoil-shaped trawl door by 13%. When the 2D optimum designs for the two geometries are compared, the novel airfoil-shaped trawl door results to be 320% more efficient than the optimized design of the typical modern trawl door. The 2D optimum designs were used as the initial designs for the 3D design optimization. The results from the 3D optimization show that the hydrodynamic efficiency could be increased by 6% for both the typical modern and novel airfoil-shaped trawl doors. Results from a 3D CFD analysis show that 3D flow effects are significant, where the values for drag are significantly underestimated in 2D CFD models.