Cod Stocks

[bigroppa]

can somebody tell me why the Norwegians are doing the right thing to conserve their fish stocks, and the rest of Europe including us, just don't get it.

Simple answer...MONEY and GREED.

[bigroppa]

Does anyone think that skippers give a toss about fish stocks??? Fish eat prawns and thats where the money is now. Make a quick buck now sod the future. As long as there is money involved, there will always be greed!!

[paulthespark]

Does anyone think that skippers give a toss about fish stocks??? Fish eat prawns and thats where the money is now. Make a quick buck now sod the future. As long as there is money involved, there will always be greed!!

i understand what you are saying but my question was why the Norwegians have got it right and we haven't ,they also have a fishing fleet and it seems to me their skippers do give a toss.

[Graham B]

To answer your question Paul, Norway aren't in the EU and part of the Common Fisheries Policy, hence the sustainable fishing they have, ditto the Faroes and Iceland, a common theme I think! It's where we all go on fishing holidays!
As long as we have our backsides ridden by Europe and pull our kegs submisivly down it will always be the same. With the quota system in place we have, coupled with slipper skippers( leasing their quota out) it's a downward spiral. On top of the mesh sizes we allow to be used! 80mm for nephrops with an average of the total haul being 70% discards and straight over the side dead, the discards mainly being juvenile immature fish!

Graham.

[parrot]

stop them [the poor trawlers!!]fishing too close,keep them offshore,,might benefit everybody in the long run..

[mark]

Does anyone think that skippers give a toss about fish stocks??? Fish eat prawns and thats where the money is now. Make a quick buck now sod the future. As long as there is money involved, there will always be greed!!

I know many commercial fishermen, and they all care deeply about the state of the sea, and even more deeply about the mess the EU has and continues to make. they are still giving hundreds of millions of euros to spain and france to build more efficient boats, yet insisting the scottish fleet be halved

even the prawn fisheries are heavily restricted now, most of the prawns (langoustines) are caught where there's not expected to be a lot of whitefish anyway, prawns live in burrows in deep mud

big thing that gets overlooked is the food chain as a whole has also been totally screwed. nearly 300,000 tons of sand eel were taken from the north sea last year - that would feed a lot of cod! Ironically the worse culprits are norway and denmark - they catch em to use as fertilizer and even burn in power stations

****es me of when folk go on about eating sustainable fish like farmed salmon - takes 5kg of fish meal to produce 1kg of salmon, and the fish meal comes from.... everything that can be taken from the sea without quota that the rest of the fish in the sea would normally scoff. Over 1 million tons of un restricted species were taken last year for the fish farming industry - basically stuff like sand eels, sprats, brown shrimp etc

currently iceland and the faroes are also hitting mackeral in a huge way - right in the middle of their migratory path, and not being in the EU they can take as many as they like, and to add insult to injury they are landing them in Scotland. there was a faroese boat on the telly last week - 30minute trawl, took 1000tons of mackeral - in 30 minutes. Our fisherman are powerless to stop em. best they could manage was to blockade the boat in peterhead to try stop it landing. Hardly susatianable. Iceland are on record as stating 2 weeks ago that they want the EU to reduce the mackeral quota to member states as it is there intention to double there catch


the whole thing is a mess. If British waters had remained british waters, there would still be plenty fish left in the north sea, problem is you have a very small sea are that every EU member state is entitled to come and fish

Last year the mallaig and north west highlands fishermans association brought self imposed no take areas upon them selves as they realised large numbers of juvenile cod and haddock were appearing, and then had to watch french and spanish boats wander in and take the lot as the self imposed restrictions were not recognised by the EU scientists

Angers me when the automatic reaction to all commercial fisherman is "greed" and "rapists of the sea" granted there's one or 2, just like theres a small number of anglers who don't give a damn and would continue fishing and taking all day if the fish were there. Every trawlerman/commercial fisherman I know cares deeply.

if you want a parallel to try illustrate how they feel at the moment, watching their industry get screwed by the EU, the feelings are much the same as the miners felt as their industry got screwed by thatcher and scargill

[Graham B]

Just a quick one Mark, After spending four and a half years as a fisheries officer boarding the vessels whilst at sea I can honestly say the fisherman who I saw having a pro-active standpoint on conservation I could count on my fingers, they were mainly seine fisherman as well! I have stated it before and saw it personaly a fisherman, standard demersal twin rig towing up a tow and landing a heap of cod which he had no quota for and a load of monk, the cod goes back in dead and he tow's straight back down the line for the monk n ot giving a crap about the cod. If this system is still in force we are head on for a collapse of the stocks, it is just a matter of time before it happens.

I fully agree with you on the pelagic fleet but this is a multimillion pound industry, as the last lot of Shetland and Peterhead boats show. These vessels and the procesors scammed millions of tonnes of mackeral and herring and got a slap on the wrist! Diabolical. As are the pout boats and sandeel boats which catch vital parts of the food chain for fishmeal and fertiliser. It is all warped!
Last thing but Mark, I am only 33, I hear all of these stories of Haddock being caught on the soft inshore ground, the same ground the single and twin rig prawn trawlers not tow up and down. I can't see anything in the archives regarding prawns. Have the prawns simply increased in numbers due to the lack of predation from the demise of the Haddock and Cod? Thats my opinion anyway!


Graham.

[Red5]

EU calls for 50 per cent cut in cod fishing - Telegraph

European hammer blow to Scotland


Interesting, will it happen, this may also bring on an increase in mls and that will affect us, will it be a good thing if we get more and bigger fish as a result ?
55cm has been banded about.
Have a look at the CV of the Greek woman in charge.
Maria Damanaki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Her CV....Sorry mate it's all Greek to me....

[Red5]

Just a quick one Mark, After spending four and a half years as a fisheries officer boarding the vessels whilst at sea I can honestly say the fisherman who I saw having a pro-active standpoint on conservation I could count on my fingers, they were mainly seine fisherman as well! I have stated it before and saw it personaly a fisherman, standard demersal twin rig towing up a tow and landing a heap of cod which he had no quota for and a load of monk, the cod goes back in dead and he tow's straight back down the line for the monk n ot giving a crap about the cod. If this system is still in force we are head on for a collapse of the stocks, it is just a matter of time before it happens.

I fully agree with you on the pelagic fleet but this is a multimillion pound industry, as the last lot of Shetland and Peterhead boats show. These vessels and the procesors scammed millions of tonnes of mackeral and herring and got a slap on the wrist! Diabolical. As are the pout boats and sandeel boats which catch vital parts of the food chain for fishmeal and fertiliser. It is all warped!
Last thing but Mark, I am only 33, I hear all of these stories of Haddock being caught on the soft inshore ground, the same ground the single and twin rig prawn trawlers not tow up and down. I can't see anything in the archives regarding prawns. Have the prawns simply increased in numbers due to the lack of predation from the demise of the Haddock and Cod? Thats my opinion anyway!


Graham.

The prawns have increased because of lack of predation, and the twist on that is that there are now more diseased prawns that the cod and haddock would have eaten which are now part of the reproductive system of the nephrops. This means that biologically they will be less able to survive as a species and we may end up with a collapse of the nephrops industry as well....As Charles Clover stated in 'The End of the Line', prepare for jellyfish and chips!

Regarding the sandeels, why do people wonder why populations of seabirds are collapsing. Puffin chicks are starving or die because their parents can only find pipefish to feed them on, which are nutritionally poor and can also cause them to choke!