bad news

[davem2005]

Well put lowrider.

Anglers do have a right to a share of the fish in the sea, as do the people who want to take pleasure trips to see dolphins and whales and many other. Anglers spend there money on bait, tackle and boats etc which all goes to create employment, far more than are employed in the commercial fishing sector.

Succesive governments have pandered to the commercials for many years and the handouts and assitance given which have in the past being justified because of the importance of fishing in the rural areas. I believe that more people in the uk are employed in the Lawnmower market than in commercial fishing yet that industry does not have its own minister, an entire government department and a state sponsored research department to back it, but its still a profitable business. When the government pulled out of mining and steel the plants and mines shut devastating local economies but over the years the workers found alternative occupations. Why should the commercial fishing industry be any different?

The commercials have had every chance to run the sea in a sustainable manor but have failed, prefering to work on a boom and bust existance where when fish are plentifull they take everything they can and then complain when there is nothing left. If they can't run an industry in a profitable way after centuries of practice its time the rules were changed to let someone else manage the fish stocks.

Modern technology has enabled us to measure far more accurately the stocks available and organisations like CEFAS and ICES make recommendations based on those figures as to what can be taken sustainably EVERY year, and plenty of fish left over to ensure that healthy stocks are maintained. Everyone gains.

Its intresting to note that the commercials have split the sea into regions for the exclusive use of each of their recognised stakeholders.

0-3 miles out its under 10M boats only
3-6 miles out its under 14M boats
6-12 Miles out its uk boats ( and foreigners who can prove they have a historic fishery in a particular area)
12 miles onwards its a free for all within the constraints of the Common Fisheries Policy set by the EU.

With anglers finally being recognised as stakeholders and valuable contributors to the uk economy it is not unreasonable to ask for part of the sea to be set aside for our use. Reffered to as "The Golden Mile"

See The 'Golden Mile' for an indepth article of how it could work and benifit us all , both anglers and commercials.

I find it very hard to have sympathy with an industry that cannot after a century of practice regulate itself in such a way as to be a long term viable proposition.

Cheers
Dave

[davem2005]

Why do the boats do what they do?

To feed the consumers needs - in one way or another we are all to blame.

Supply - Demand...without the demand of the population there would be no need for the overfishing.

Now before people get on their high horses saying that they individually do not contribute to this mass "need" then that itself is also not true. Fish meal is used in farming as fertiliser or even feed....so therefore there are other products that we buy that have a link directly to the fish that are caught

So unless you are an organic, tofu eating vegan Buddhist it's very unlikly that your buying behaviour is helping the environment or the fish stocks.

We are very much a consumerist society - no longer small holders or farmers, we have to buy everything we need to live...unless we change that trend then we are doomed to exploit ALL resources until they are gone.

I'm no badge wearing eco warrior by any stroke - just a realist.

Tony,
The sea has a massive capacity to restock itself given an opportunity. The problem starts when you overfish the immature fish without giving them a chance to breed leading to a species being unable to maintain its own level.

If a proportion of this years good stocks (as a direct result of a good breeding year in 2005) are left to breed the scientists are predicting a huge increase in the quota's by 2010.

Falcone,
Everything I have read recently with regard to fish moving north to colder waters suggests this is not the case. There are three distinct breeding stocks of cod in the north sea and none show any signs of relocating north.

Estimates put the cod stocks in the north sea in 1980 at 250,000 tonnes plus, whereas in early 2007 it was put at 35,000 tonnes. The decline started long before the sandeels were being hammered and the phrase global warming had been thought up, so what did happen.

Its just my theory but in the period 1980 to the present day technology went balistic. Diesel engines got bigger and more powerfull and onboard electronics could do things that were unthinkable only a generation before.

If long term factors such as global warming and fish moving north were to blame how come the graph showing annual cod landings does not reflect this gradual decline? It looks more like a rollercoaster with each subsequent recovery being smaller than the previous one.

Cheers
dave

[The Great Wallsendo]

not denying there is a fundamental issue with overfishing and unscrupulous tactics...but the industry is there to serve the consumer for all intents and purposes...of which we are all a part

As has been said before if the consumer changed it's habits then the industry would have to change also...if for example the consumer asked for non high graded fish (similar to the way that you could ask for an organic chicken) then that would surely lend weight to the stopping of that and other practices

[Red5]

Great topic, and some great post from both points of view.
I personally think the global warming myth with regards cod moving north is a smokescreen. As far as I am aware our tidal current in the North Sea sweeps down from the North (very cold water) and then circulates as far south as the channel before moving back north again (warmed up slightly) towards Norway. Where are they always advertising for Sea fishing holidays for monster cod?????
The Bristol Channel.....One of the best cod fishing areas in the UK....Where is Bristol.....South Coast....What tidal stream hits the south coast....Yes that's right, the gulf stream...Warm water!
Truth is the commercial vessels do work on the principal of boom and bust....How many are serious about taking up measures to prevent bycatch??????
People talk about the Grand Banks...We have our very own in the North Sea....hundreds of years ago, the world famous Craster Kipper was born. Craster had countless boats going out every day to bring back the herring to create the kippers. What happened. No one thought about the consequences of overfishing and Herring became virtually extinct in the North Sea. Now your herring is not landed at Craster and is brought in from west coast. What have fisheries learned? Nothing.
We blame Europe. Yes they have the most responsibility in the debacle that is the CFP and our government for being spineless in not taking the steps that the Icelandic government took and is now reaping the rewards by supplying us with most of our white fish and getting tourists to spend thousands of pounds to experience quality angling, but as I have said, what steps have the commercial sector taken to reduce bycatch and fish in a more environmentally sound manner. NONE.

[davem2005]

A very difficult comparison to make tony,

A farmer can only kill the chickens he grows, a totally sustainable practice,

whereas a fisherman can trawl the seas till a particular species goes below its minimum sustainable limit. This figure is estimated at around 50,000 tonnes for cod in the north sea.

So in theory the commercials will/can still keep catching cod after the theoretical "last cod" has being caught.

I think many consumers are changing their ways and many producer organisations such as fish finger manufacturers are sourcing fish from sustainable sources and changing what they put in them (pollock instead of cod). Wether this is driven by consumer tastes changing or the rising price of cod who knows, but the simple fact is that the alternative products are just not available to buy in sufficient quantities, and when they are available they fetch premium prices. I think farmed cod was £2 a kilo dearer than wild cod, atlantic cod was £1 dearer and some of the more exotic species marketed as an alternative leave you thinking you would e better off buying lobster instead.

To get back to the original post and add a bit more bad news. Plans are afoot to change the way quota is allotted.

Currently the largest proportion of the quota is held by the smallest number of boats (14M + boats) There are calls for a larger proportion to be given to those boats that represent the largest proportion of the fleet. The 10M boats...and guess where they fish mostly?

I wonder if they take it in turns to net Blyth beach or form an orderly queue.

Cheers
Dave

[Falcone]

Dave..... I wasnt just talking about cod, when i was talking about rising sea temperatures, i was talking about the marine habitat as a whole.
10 years ago we were allowed to fish for salmon and sea trout from 31st march till 31st august, we used to get the spring salmon runs in april, just 4-5 years ago those spring salmon were a thing of the past, the salmon and grilse runs were taking place much later in the year AUGUST, the seasons were/are shifting.
10 years ago i remember trawling in september and having big bulks of prawns 30 boxes from 2 hauls, those prawns are not coming out of the mud untill december, if you caught any prawns prior to the frosts they were very soft shelled and very low quality due to the water temperature. Look at our weather as a whole, when do we get the first frosts of a winter????
Ive seen the trends in catches from 1995 through till 2002 not just in the amounts you catch, but at the times of the year you're catching them, and its been shifting.
Look at last winter when daffodils were flowering in february, 4 weeks before they supposed to, you cant tell me that climate change isnt having an effect on marine life and there life cycles.
We had been coal mining for a century or two, and the seas in shore were nutrient/mineral rich from the coal mines, when they all began getting closed in the late 80s, early 90s, i believe this had some part to play in the lack of catches from both shore anglers and the inshore fishing vessels.
If you ask the shore anglers, and boat owners the majority will back up this claim.

I do believe over fishing has a huge part to play in the decimation of fish stocks, but there are a lot of environmental factors to be considered.

[Falcone]

One other way to go would be go down a path which has been done before:

Decomissioning.

A few years ago the NASF {north atlantic salmon fund} bought back the licenses for the entitlement to fish for salmon using drift nets/ T nets.
Fishermen were offered settlements based on previous years catches, this would not effect the white fish or shellfish license.

A similar thing was done in the early 90s with the whole fishing fleet, where the government offered fishermen a settlement to relinquish there license. Again this was based on the fishermens track record of previous catches
This cut the number of licenses down and a lot of boats went to the breakers yards to be stripped and burned.

[davem2005]

Now thats the only good suggestion I have seen for uses an RSA license fee could be put to ...not only that but sink the boats to make more wrecks

[ScottyJim]

I have been following this post with interest. I think everyone would agree we are taking too much out of the system for it to be sustainable. It’s how this is done which concerns me. Go to the bottom of the food chain and you start with the invertebrates, etc, living in the mud on the sea bottom. Their habitat is continually being dredged and destroyed by nethrop trawling, gravel extraction, etc. Living on this mud are the small feedfish such as sandeeel etc. Step in the industrial fishing fleet of Europe. Luckily we don’t have too many in the UK, as far as I am aware. But we still have the effects. Up here, the local inshore commercials had a campaign to stop Danish industrials fishing sandeel on the “Wee Bankies” just off the Fife coast. These industrial commercials to massive damage.

“ A recent article in the Fishing News illustrated some of the problems associated with industrial fishing:
On 4th September the Benny Dorthe of Thyboron landed at her home port with 543 tonnes of what were reported as sandeels. But the Danish Inspectorate, after taking several samples of the catch, found that only 59% was sandeels. The other 41% consisted of several other species, including 21% haddock equivalent to 114 tonnes. The vessel’s industrial fishing license was suspended for one month, although she was still permitted to fish for human consumption species. The Danish Fishermen’s Ecological Network found that the average size of the haddock was probably around 100 grams per individual (the legal MLS is equivalent to about 170g)
“On that assumption, it means that 1,140,000 individual haddock have been caught and reduced to meal and oil for a price of 1 Danish kroner per kg” said the organisations Knud Anderson. “When longliners catch their haddock it is a high quality white fish product and the price is 18 DKr per kg. The fish has a chance to reproduce itself several times and weighs on average 800 grammes.”

This is one boat on one trip. Our fish stocks are being destroyed long before our whitefish industry has a go. I wonder how many sandeel individuals were on that boat, and how many cod they could have fed?

The most immoral practice of all is discarding. Reading the data from CEFAS, ICES and other sources, depending on the type of fishing being done, anything from 20% to 60% of catch is discarded for being undersized/out of quota. MFA released figures say that 126,000 metric tonnes of demersal fish were landed in UK ports Jan-Oct 2007. Demersal fish being cod, whiting, haddock, etc. Lets work on a 25% discard. If 126,000 tonnes were landed then 31,500 tonnes were discarded. Do the maths. Let’s assume an average size of a quarter of a pound for each discarded fish. We get,
31500 x 1000 x 2.2 x 4 = 277,200,000 fish thrown back dead. Two hundred and seventy seven million fish using a low-end discard percentage.
Yes we need to be worried about the fish being landed, but should be just as concerned, if not more, about the fish that didn’t make it to port.

[Glenn Kilpatrick]

Another great thread.

Anglers are finally getting recognised as a valuable contribution to the economy and are a sustainable use of our seas.

Anglers who care are pushing for the introduction of a golden mile of no netting or trawling, which is an area of most intrest to anglers.

Take a look at some of the websites of organisations who are pushing for an improved deal for anglers...The SACN, sscan and the NFSA are a few that spring to mind.

Ah that's why Defra just threw out the bass managment plan, increased the north sea cod quota and are keen to introduce licences, bag limits, no take zones (for everyone), and bait digging restrictions.

The SACN (Unelected and unrepresentative with less than 1000 members) are pretty much the green Party in disguise Dave, if they have their way angling will be unrecognisable in 10 years time if it exists at all.

[mick]

bad news

Getting back to the initial post - at least we know the fish are there if the fella managed 29 stone! I know its not what an angler wants to see but if you are making your living from the sea then you would do so to the best of your abillity, I know I personally would, yes it is short sited but unfortunately that is how I feel that fish stocks are viewed. You only have to consider 'minimum fish sizes' to understand that these are woefully low for many target species. As an angler I fish for pleasure & competively at various levels and personally do not have a problem with the commercial fishing industry, they have to make a living, ultimately the industry itself will be the cause of its own downfall and I think they know that in the long run.
On a personal 'lighter note', I just wish the commercial lads would go all out at the Whiting as they are establishing themselves as the main predator and they must be having an impact on the cod stocks, it used to be Norfolk/Sufolk for dedicated good sized Whiting sessions, but now its Linconshire and they are creeping further North in better numbers every year.

[Lowrider]

You seem to fail to understand many of the points i have put up. Maybe you have your view and are unable to see beyond it. In the beginning of this thread i or the guy originally posting never mentioned the word trawler, It was a guy shooting gill nets off blyth pier that we were discussing, untill people start off on the rants about trawlers.
Say the word commercial, everyone assumes big factory ship trawlers, so it cirtainly wasnt me who started the trend of veering away from the first post in this thread.
Like i said in an earlier post, do some research and you might be surprised at what you will find.

No,i simply used a generic term to cover all fishing boats.
May have been wrong but given the nature of this forum to all intents and purposes any commercial fishing is lumped into the same group.
As to research,suggest an avenue,i have laready said where most of my opinion came from,TV series were commercial fisherman gave there opinion and we say life as a fisherman.
Was everything we saw and heard on there wrong???
I have also asked what any commercial fishing group are doing to correct any mis- information,as yet i have not seen an answer.

From the posts you have offered it seems to me that you feel that the poor fish stocks are entirely down to over fishing for that particular species.
Look further down the food chain at the sandeels what were pilfered by the french and spanish boats, let into our waters by our lacklustre government, there demise by over fishing

From the views in this thread it seems the general consensus is over fishing by our commercial fleet is the SOLE reason the marine habitat is in the state it is, and thats just not true.

But fishing and over fishing of ANY species has an effect.
You have just said the over fishing by the French could have an effect on the food chain,but that still fishing.
Still having an effect,is it wrong cos there French but fine if local??
I fill to see the difference.
Of course no one thing can alter the entire marine habitat,but fishing is one aspect that can be controlled.
It also has a massive effect as has been shown time and time again i many parts of the world.
Again i say,before we blame other aspects of any problems then the commercial guys should sort out their own back yard.
Not try lessen the effect they are having by blaming " global warming,the French etc.

[Red5]

The SACN (Unelected and unrepresentative with less than 1000 members) are pretty much the green Party in disguise Dave, if they have their way angling will be unrecognisable in 10 years time if it exists at all.

What Glenn? Conservation minded with a view to sustainable future fisheries rather than the free for all we have now with people decimating bait beds, rubbish strewn all over marks, people taking huge bags of fish from the boat and chucking them in the bin when they get home or giving it away 'coz they don't eat fish' and people hammering mackeral in the summer for no other reason than they can!

[mark]

Supply - Demand...without the demand of the population there would be no need for the overfishing.

simple economics that could equally apply to any commodity, and I still believe is the biggest single failing in the CFP namely the ability to trade/sell quotas/allowances

take any commodity you like, a few large organisations buy up as much production as they can of that commodity, thus the market prices rockets, so economically thats the product that everyone involved will want to get there hands on, will the price holds high, the company holding the allowance sells it at a premium, so the buyer of the allowance needs to 'produce' more to cover their costs, welcome to overfishing

If allowances were rigidly attached to the licence holder, and were not a saleable commodity I wonder how much difference it would of made, maybe none, maybe a lot

The one thing that I am still amazed by is the fact that whilst the main breeding grounds for Cod are well known, no measures have been taken to permanently close these areas to fishing

I have several friends on the west coast that are commercial fisherman, some merely shellfish some mixed. They have imposed upon themselves a system where if they see lots of juvenile fish coming aboard, they share that information with each other, and then avoid that area altogether, but they are now seeing another problem arising. All their returns are recorded, so you can publicly see what is caught from where... so whaddya know larger 'foreign' vessels turn up and go straight to the areas they have recorded as being full of juvenile fish.

The guys running the creels, have adapted all their pots with a 1' escape door so all the smaller prawns can escape the pots, any that don't escape go back anyway, but they are now seeing an increasing number of french boats - big 100' french boats, potting along the same ground and taking every last thing that crawls into the pots. but by and large its the local boats that have been trying to protect their patch are getting the blame, to the point where Britains first marine national park is likely to be formed which will ban all forms of fishing - commercial and recreational, even anchoring in certain bays may be outlawed.

2 years ago, from 3 pots we would pull about a dozen in size brown crab and at least 1 lobster. Last summer, I got 2 lobster in a fortnight, and a couple of decent browns a day, but even more noticeably hardly any velvets, where previously we would get pots full of the the things, and I know first hand that that was not a situation brought about by the <10m local boats

other species such as spurdogs have no quota, last year 2 longliners, and by longliners these are are not the little traditional 20' foot cobbles, but 150' ships that lay 5 miles of long line at a go, virtual wiped out spurs and from some of the most important pupping grounds on the west coast, along with a massive bycatch of Skate Tope and Dogs

Once again, many anglers returning to Sunart, Teacuis, Aline, Mull and surrounds looked straight at the small local commercial boats and blamed them, for the place being a virtual desert

lots of discussion, but not many offers of practical solutions in here so far. For me, I'd suggest permanent closure of the cod's breeding grounds (for at least 5 years), removal of allowance from any company that doesn't actually own a licenced boat, outlaw trading of allowances, and restrict all vessels > 10m, possibly reallocate allowances to the <10m boats, and reward the <10m boats with extra allowance for juvenile bycatch avoidance

the smaller boats will still make a living, possibly better than they do now and keep vital small rural industries alive, the stocks should get a huge lift towards recovery and the french can eat more snails, the spanish can eat more donkeys, and the angler should be quids in

it'll never happen though

[The Great Wallsendo]

Ok if it's solutions then we need more done by the fisheries patrols...more checks and more policing of our waters - prob with that ideal is that it's funded by the Government (ergo there's prob no money) and the last few times I've been at the Royal Quays the fishery vessel is berthed up

And if there are toe rags and illegal netters - why aren't there (more?) local baliffs that can be contacted when people see or suspect netting that possibly isn't strictly kosher...again lack of money more than likely...what about the coastguard or the police - would they just shrug their shoulders? I know there's quite a few angling bobbys on here...what remit do our boys in blue have regarding illegal netters and the like?