In reply to the Sunday Times article "Britains Vanished Seas"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5375191.ece Malcom Gilbert wrote:
I don’t go back to 1776 or even the 1830s ! --- but a mere three decades ago I personally witnessed our seas teeming with fish, relative to today that is.
In the mid and late 1970s I fished on dense mackerel shoals consisting of 1+ kilo fish, from Mullion Island on eastern side of Mounts Bay, right down to Tater Du light house (20+ kilometres) , west side of Lamorna Cove. No matter where you dropped a line (feathers or plastics) you immediately got full lines. These fish extended from 20 meters depth outwards off the land. The tonnage was incomprehensible, but not enough to withstand the industrial fishery with klondykers plus 24/7 landing at Penzance into bulk grain carriers for road transport to Hull where the mackerel were processed into fertiliser.
Grey mullet were also frequently seen in huge shoals and caught with seine nets at places like the Scillies, Sennen [visit
http://www.peterpuddiphattphotography.c ... 32899.html , Penberth, Porthgwidden (St Ives),. In 1974 I witnessed the whole of the cove on east side of Gurnards Head (west of St Ives) almost solidified with mullet. The shoal extended from right up against the rocks under Gurnards Head east to Carnelloe Rock (900 metres?) and out about 300 metres. They were so thick from the seabed to the surface that there must have been more fish than water. Fortunately, the conditions didn’t allow them to be seined. Very spectacular though with 5-7 lb mullet frequently jumping like salmon leaping a waterfall.
As recent as the early 1980s, vast shoals of spurdogs congregated around the south west. Boats that targeted this seasonal fishery with traditional hand baited lines reported shoals ten miles long. Then some clever whoops thought of using mono nets on them. Below I’ve cut/paste a paragraph of an email I sent to a student who was researching the same species on the other side of the Atlantic where they are known as spiny dogfish.
Anyway, back to dogfish, I gather you have copies of the Fisheries Report from the early eighties and I will be sending you a newspaper cutting which appeared on March 5th 1982 in Fishing News which is a report of how the port landings were being broken by thirty-foot class boats and on one day alone there were insufficient boxes in Newlyn to land the catches into, they had to be piled in huge mounds down the entire length of the quay. Incidentally, many of them were aborting and even the report refers to the super efficiency of the multi-mono nets which replaced the traditional long line fishery. The traditional long line fishery was one where the hooks were hand baited and the amount of work in acquiring the bait and baiting the hooks for the baskets prior to shooting restricted the amount of gear and what’s more, even when dogs were marking well on the sonar, if they were not feeding the long line method would not catch them. With the advent of nets - where there is no preparation required and, of course, whether the dogs were feeding or not the nets caught them - the increase in fishing mortality was just tremendous, as evidenced by the spectacular unprecedented catches which exceeded sixty tonnes daily for many consecutive days. The only stats I have access to are the normal MAFF stats which are published each year by the stationery office. I have a current copy for the 1998 stats, which shows that in Newlyn there were just 97 tonnes of dogfish landed for the entire year!A superb tasting crustacean, the saltwater crayfish – Palinurus Vulgaris [
http://www.jjphoto.dk/animal_archive/pa ... lgaris.htm ] that is know locally just as ‘craws’ were plentiful up to about the mid 1970s. Originally caught in pots with lobsters and crabs and in tangle nets (old type courelene twine), the craws also attracted commercial divers in the 1960s who reported areas where the sea bed was paved with them. The quantities they were able to collect per dive was testament to the abundance of these wonderful animals. Then, in the mid to late 1970s the tangle gear changed to mono netting -- end of craws! Today, craws are so scarce that they can legitimately be called rare.
So there have been huge changes to the ocean’s fish stocks during the last thirty years, let alone the last century. I’ve seen a wonderful photo of fish landed in St Ives harbour being loaded onto horse drawn carts. I guess it was taken during the late 1930s. What is immediately significant is the size of the fish. Huge hake, turbot, pollack, john dory and of course common skate like barn doors which required four or six men to load onto the carts. I must try and get a copy of it with date.
Incidentally, during the 1970s, 2 stone turbot (28 lbs+) were regularly caught around Cornwall. Such specimens are rare today.
Despite all this evidence, many influential voices within the commercial sector still deny that fish stocks have deteriorated. There was even a book published a couple of years ago called Cornwall Fish and Seafood by Carol Trewin that was highly publicised. Here is an extract from the launch publicity [
http://www.england-in-particular.info/g ... e4-02.html ]. No guesses who the drivers behind these lies were.
"Cornish fishing is thriving, and so are fish stocks in the seas around the Cornish coast. If you don’t believe this then look no further than a radical new book on fishing in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly that turns many preconceptions on their head. Cornish Fishing and Seafood reveals the true state of fishing and fish stocks in the far South West, and discovers the thriving onshore industry that processes and handles the fish and shellfish landed by England’s last fishing fleet of any size.”The current state of South West stocks and the question of ‘had they changed’ and if so ‘how they had changed’, was a topic for some prolonged and difficult discussion at the Invest in Fish project. After one particularly acrimonious meeting, one very senior leader of the commercials who has been known to me since he left school, approached me at the bar after the meeting and actually agreed that fish stocks had been decimated but I should understand that it was unrealistic to imagine they could ever be rebuilt to previous levels and if the commercials were to acknowledge the true situation, such an admission would open the doors to even more restrictive management such as reduced quotas. In other words, they know; but they aren’t about to admit the truth. On the contrary, their short term interests are best served by challenging the very notion that stocks are in trouble.
Malcolm Gilbert
