lol,
Hows the Newfoundland Banks coming along btw? The USA took stern action there, but had too.
The sea needs to be divided up into "farms" and looked after instead of "devil take the hindmost". I hear Iceland has a great system and ginormous fish are being landed.
While here in the UK...
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thetimes.co.uk
What the eye doesn't see...
BY KIRSTY FERGUSSON
Big beam trawlers are turning the seabeds around Britain into a wasteland
IMAGINE a wilderness of hills and valleys, wide plains and ravines; imagine the forests, the grasslands and the thousands of creatures feeding and breeding there. Now bulldoze this landscape to shattered rubble. The plants and the breeding places laid waste; the creatures all dead or fled.
You can watch this happening any day of the year. Just go to the coast and scan the sea and you’ll see the bulldozers at work. You’ll see only what’s happening on the surface, of course: a large, trawler-type vessel, ploughing along the horizon, regardless of the weather, day or night, going about its legitimate business.
What you do not see is how the vast steel beams that weight their nets batter and smash the seabed as they pass. Beam trawlers are marine bulldozers. And they destroy not just the deep seabed, they are wrecking the inshore fishing industry as well.
David Sales, who has been fishing the Dorset coast for 45 years, is campaigning for a ban on beam trawling but he is pessimistic and, having sat on government advisory committees for 35 years, well informed.
“The Government was courageous enough to ban drift-net fishing, which was so murderous for dolphins and porpoises,” he says, “and now this too must be addressed, before it’s too late. There would be a public outcry if the damage done were visible. Imagine if farmers were bulldozing the landscape — there’d be hell to pay.
“The scallop dredgers are just as bad. A few weeks ago our local scallop divers hit a rich seam and did well for a few days. Then the dredgers turned up and the whole area was destroyed: all the scallops gone and the habitat for 50 or 60 other species of fish and shellfish — which has taken thousands of years to evolve — knocked to pieces. The last couple of years have been terrible for that kind of destruction.”
Sales and his son John are based at West Bay, a tiny harbour supporting a handful of inshore fishermen, between Lyme Regis and Weymouth on the Dorset coast. Now on the point of retirement, David sees little future for John and West Bay’s other fishermen.
“We’re typical inshore fishermen — we tie up in bad weather and, in viable conditions, operate within a ten-to-12-mile radius of our ports, checking our lobster and crab pots, dropping and picking up small, weighted nets which seem to catch any quantity of dogfish and spider crabs and a bucketful of skate, sole, plaice, cod, bass and gurney.
“With a bit of luck, we would be able to support ourselves through the worst of the winter weather when the boats were tied up and think ‘Oh well, if we’re not fishing at least we’re conserving stocks’. But whereas 20 years ago, if there was an Atlantic storm the harbours would be full of fishing boats taking shelter, now you’ll see the lights of five or six beam trawlers out to sea, whatever the weather. Local chaps don’t stand a chance.”
Down at the harbour, Jack Woolmington prepares his boat to leave on the 6am tide as, weather permitting, he does six days a week. At 48, he says he wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t love it, but concedes that early retirement might be forced on him.
He fishes as generations of inshore fishermen have done, chugging a few miles out to sea to find his nets, which lie, weighted with chains on the seabed, marked at either end with buoys, then sets them on a winch, hauls them in, removes the fish and crabs and resets them.
As the little boat bucks and turns towards Weymouth, a beam trawler out to sea catches his eye and he wonders whether the lines of his third net will have been accidentally sheared by the bigger boat. This time, however, they have been spared.
This is not an easy or overly efficient way to catch fish. But as he prises the spider crabs out of his nets, discarding all but a handful which are large enough to sell, Woolmington is philosophical.
“There’s still fish to be caught and a living to be made. All fishermen will moan — worse than the farmers if you give them a chance — but if it’s as bad as that you should get out of the business, take advantage of the decommissioning scheme if you can, and do something else. Like everyone else, fishermen have mortgages and families and if they can see a way of making a profit, they will. It’s easy to make judgments about the fishing industry from the outside.”
Roger Bowring isn’t complaining either, at least not too loudly, for he has a plan. At35 he is one of the youngest fishermen working out of West Bay, on the harbour’s only trawler, a nine-metre vessel, with his boss, Nigel Hawker. Brimming with good-natured energy and enthusiasm, he nevertheless believes that fishing boats over 12 metres should be denied access to inshore waters “because the competition isn’t fair — either on us or the fish”.
He regrets too, the impending loss of a local community. Despite the odd feud, it is a mutually supportive one, which in some cases has spanned many generations of the same families.
And Roger’s plan for the lean times in the future? He becomes uncharacteristically shy. “I’ve heard that being a male escort pays very well,” he laughs.
There are other solutions for this beleaguered industry. David and John Sales are keen admirers of New Zealand’s tough laws on conservation and quota evasion, which include fishing bans in some areas backed by stiff penalties.
John, who worked in New Zealand for six months, applauds the public awareness and readiness to confront craft that pose any environmental threat to their sealife.
David mentions an initiative in Poole Harbour which, he believes, could also work elsewhere. Manila clams, recently introduced to the harbour, are being harvested under a strictly licensed, sustainable policy which brought £250,000 to the Poole fishermen last winter.
“This, surely, is what we need to be thinking about if we are to keep our indigenous fishing communities,” he argues. “I believe there is still just time to remedy the situation before we have no local fishermen left to take advantage of such schemes.
“But we must have a global policy, for the problems afflicting West Bay are hitting inshore fishermen all over the world, from the Maldives to Mauritania. The action will have to be drastic: the whole offshore fleet must be cut by half; there should be a total ban on beam and dredge (rockhopper) trawling, and the area within 12 miles of the shore should be reserved for indigenous fishermen, who should have a say in the management of their fishing grounds.
“There will be tears if the governments of the world find the courage to impose them, but those tears will only last for a decade.” |
