A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  In the Isle of Man fishing started in October 1937 although it wasn’t until 1969 that the queenies began to be fished. Since 1972 the scallop boats have worked further afield. Scallops tend to lie in hollows in the seabed, with the flat shell uppermost. On the other hand, queenies do not recess themselves into the seabed and can live on a harder seabed. Sometimes they lie on the same grounds and, before 1969, queenies were being thrown back into the sea as a by-catch, though now both are landed. The scallop fishery is today the main fishery in the Isle of Man, and superseded the herring fishery after the Second World War.15

  Notes

  1 Angus Martin, Fishing and Whaling, Edinburgh, 1995.

  2 J.T. Jenkins, The Sea Fisheries, London, 1920. Jenkins was superintendent of the Lancashire and Western Sea Fisheries at around the turn of the twentieth century.

  3 F.M. Davis, An Account of the Fishing Gear of England and Wales, London, 1937.

  4 Eija Kennerley, The Old Fishing Community of Poulton-le-Sands, Lancaster, undated.

  5 A.M. Wakefield, ‘Cockling at Morecambe Bay’, in The Pall Mall Magazine, edited by Lord Frederic Hamilton, vol. XVI, London, 1898.

  6 J.H. Orton and H. Paynter, ‘The Lancashire Sea Fisheries’, in Scientific Survey of Blackpool and District, 1936. For more details on this fishery, see ‘The Fisheries of Morecambe Bay’ by Andrew Scott, in Morecambe, Lancaster and District: Souvenir of the Conference of the National Union of Teachers, Easter 1908, published by OUP/Hodder, 1909.

  7 J. Geraint Evans, Cockles & Mussels: Aspects of Shellfish Gathering in Wales, Cardiff, 1977, and Inshore Fishermen of Wales, Cardiff, 1991.

  8 See www.msc.org for more information on the MSC.

  9 George Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire, Llandysul, 1994.

  10 See The Transactions of the Liverpool National Eisteddfod 1884, Liverpool, 1885.

  11 Colin Matheson, Wales and the Sea Fisheries, Cardiff, 1929.

  12 J.O. Halliwell, Notes of Family Excursions in North Wales, London, 1860.

  13 Matheson, op. cit., 1929.

  14 A. Franklin, G.D. Pickett and P.M. Connor, ‘The Scallop and Its Fishery in England and Wales’, Lowestoft, 1980 – a laboratory leaflet from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

  15 See the resource booklet Manx Sea Fishing 1600–1990s published by the Manx Heritage Foundation, 1991.

  10

  LOBSTERS AND CRABS

  Commercial lobster fishing in Scotland only developed relatively recently, around the mid-eighteenth century. In England, Daniel Defoe noted a lobster fishery at Cromer in 1724.1 In Wales the earliest mention is by the Rev. William Bingley who noted a lobster fishery around Bardsey Island in 1800.2 Prior to these times lobster fishing was primarily for local consumption. The growth in the trade only grew once companies were set up with well-smacks that collected the lobsters from the inaccessible parts of the country where they abounded.

  Ireland, too, had a considerable lobster fishery in the nineteenth century and it was reported that 10,000 lobsters were sent to London each week. The same source states that ‘immense quantities are also procured on the west coast of Scotland’. He declared that 30,000 lobsters were seen at Greenock coming from the Outer Hebrides. In 1887 in Scotland 681,100 lobsters and 2,215,700 crabs were landed, this being assumed to be an average year.3

  Grimsay, a tiny island squeezed between Benbecula and North Uist, has been renowned for its lobsters which were largely taken off the Monach Isles and sent to the market in London, obviously via Greenock.4 Since the 1840s the same family – the Stewarts – have been building small gaff-rigged double-enders specifically for this fishery. Today it survives, still with wooden fishing boats, some of which originate from Tom’s Yard in Polruan, Cornwall.

  In the same way each lobster community has developed its own unique boat. The Yorkshire men use their cobles while at Cromer the double-ended crab boats were once tractored into the water off the beach, as we saw in Chapter 4. Crab fishing there dates back to at least the thirteenth century and probably much earlier.5 Up north, the Orkney fishermen use their small whills, similar to the larger yoles so favoured by the line fishermen. In Aberdaron, at the tip of the Lleyn peninsula, close to Bardsey Island where Bingley noted his lobsters, small double-ended herring boats evolved into transom-sterned, gunter-rigged boats especially developed to haul pots over the stern.

  Nigel Legge of Cadgwith aboard his boat hauling in pots. This shape of pot, framed in steel bar, is cheaper and much less work to produce. (Courtesy of Nigel Legge)

  Cornwall, too, has had a thriving lobster and crab fishery since the eighteenth century. Cadgwith, close to the Lizard, still survives upon this fishery. Their transom-sterned boats are still hauled up and down the beach as they always were. Fresh crabs can be bought from the tiny shack alongside the beach. Penberth is tiny cove to the west of Penzance where a few open lobster boats are still drawn up. Further east, Portloe seems like time has stood still with several potters on the hard while the small crabbers of Gorran Haven sit on the sand in the harbour as they’ve done for generations. Across the Channel, the islands of Jersey and Guernsey still retain their crab fleets. All very quaint and picturesque for the tourist, but just how long these remnants will survive is anyone’s guess.

  Just as the craft used for potting differ around the country, so do the pots themselves. Many of the Cornish used inkwell withy pots, as did some of the fishers from South Wales and small communities such as Clovelly, though the men of St Ives preferred inkwell pots made of wire. Hoop pots, also known as creeves, were favoured in Scotland and on the east coast of England. Today these are made from a steel frame, rectangular in plan with a curved top – the so-called cottage shape – although sometimes alkathene pipe is used to make the curved shape. All usually have three compartments and openings or eyes for the shellfish to enter and access by the fisherman is through a door that can be secured shut quickly and safely. Summer pots can be smaller with only two compartments and two eyes. Other local traditions have again created a number of variations of pots. Steel has the added advantage that it doesn’t need weighting down with bricks.

  Crail in Fife, on the east coast of Scotland, is generally regarded by many as the pre-eminent lobster harbour on this coast. However, back in the eighteenth century it was a ‘great resort for herring fishermen from Aberdeen, Angus and the Mearns’.6 By the mid-twentieth century much of this herring was gone and lobsters and crabs were the mainstay of the fishing industry.

  The boat that was adapted for the hauling and setting of the lobster creels became known as the partan yawl, a ‘partan’ being a crab (Cancer paguras) in Old Scots. This was basically a smaller version of the bauldie, which in itself was a smaller version of the fifie. The partan yawls were double-ended and only about 20ft in length. Depending on who built them and for whom, the sternpost was either very upright or slightly raked. Today, many examples of these beautifully shaped boats can be found all along the Scottish coast from Fife to the Moray Firth, and sometimes further afield. In Fraserburgh, a variant was a Fraserburgh yole (the words ‘yole’ and ‘yawl’ both come from the Norse yol or jol literally meaning ‘small boat’).

  Partan yawls, like their larger brothers, were undecked in their early days: they were generally indiscernible from these in their early days. The only difference was that they sought crabs and lobsters and only set one dipping lug. But, as decked fifies appeared in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, so did the creel men copy this tendency. Then, as motor power arrived in the twilight of the twentieth century, these had small units added. As was the pattern elsewhere, the craft became fuller in time, especially around the after end, to compensate for this. However, transom sterns were never adopted, so that the creel boat of the first half of that century was a boat about 20ft long with a foredeck and side decks and a central hatch that was sometimes covered over. The engine sat beneath a box towards the stern and often a hauler aided the pulling in of the creels. These continued to be
built until the 1960s, and many examples can still be found.

  Inkwell crab pots being made by Albert Braund and unknown in Clovelly. As well as herring which was an autumnal fishery, potting for crabs and lobsters was a successful fishery for Clovelly fishers. (Courtesy of Stephen Perham)

  Some years ago I experienced a couple of trips upon Fife lobster boats. The first time, on a cold January morning, was out of nearby Pittenweem with brothers Graeme and Raymond Reilly. Creeling was their mainstay fishing, yet the boat, a 1980-built Cygnus 32 called Comely III, was rigged for trawling prawns when the lobsters were scarce. The winch sat on the wide aft deck behind the wheelhouse so that the deck had plenty of room to haul the creels aboard. We motored out, along the coast and past Crail, one of the most picturesque harbours along the coast, where the brothers both live and work out of in summer. Although it’s well protected, there’s a surge in the small harbour and not much room for their large boat. Their cooking shed lies upon the quay, from where fresh sales can be made in the summer season, but otherwise it’s more convenient to drive the few miles from home to Pittenweem and work out of there.

  It wasn’t long before Raymond had brought the boat round into the wind and Graeme was using the boathook to catch hold of two plastic cans serving as markers. Creeling is, like most fishing, a tedious routine of hauling and re-setting. The line is bent round the Spencer-Carter hauler and brought up. Pots are set in trains, twenty pots to a train in their case, and each pot is hauled aboard in turn, emptied of its contents, re-baited and stacked aft. Lobsters are of course the prize, but in the first train we had more than a boxful of partan crabs, pinkish crustaceans that legally had to be over 5.5in across the shell, although the buyer insisted on 6in. These at the time fetched eighty pence per kilo whereas a lobster, the legal size being 87cm along the carpus, would fetch £13.50 a kilo. The lobsters were poor though, and, with over a thousand seal pups born that year on the island, the brothers weren’t slow to attach blame to these mammals. Seals are the bane of the fisherman, and a seal pushing its nose into a creel can destroy the netting around it with ease. The proof was obvious. And replacement is a costly business.

  Once all twenty pots were aboard and re-baited they were streamed out once more and left a couple of days being hauled again (weather permitting). The bait they were using was fish heads, bought from the filleting sheds of Pittenweem for £2 a box. There’s a certain irony here in that all these harbours along this coast were once a bustle of activity and now only Pittenweem has its landings of mostly prawns. Yet the filleting sheds are still active. Vans arrived each day with fish from far afield, mostly from Aberdeen, to be processed and then more vans picked it up each morning and drove all over Scotland, hawking the catch as ‘fresh Pittenweem fish’. That’s the nature of the business, which has been transformed from a local fishery to an international industry.

  We motored over to the Carr Brigs off Fife Ness. Here the calmer waters seethed with buoys from dozens of trains of creels. Crabs caught in shallower water have less water content to counteract the water pressure, I was once told, and hence have more meat in them. But this produces another problem for fishers here, the proliferation of pots set by part-time fishermen. The East Neuk had some eight or nine full-time creel boats working and probably twice that in part-timers. The consequence is that the grounds are hammered. And it was winter, so imagine what it’s like in summer when there’s twice the number of creels down. Twice we had fouled trains when others had laid their creels over ours. ‘There’s one particularly thick fucker who’s always doing that,’ Graeme told me in exasperation after the two of them had spent fifteen minutes unravelling their train from his. Paradoxically this guy was the only part-timer they trusted not to lift their pots and empty them. ‘You can never prove anything though, but sometimes you just know someone has been here before you,’ he continued.

  The next ten trains relinquished poor catches of both crabs and lobsters. Velvet crabs were plentiful, as were soft-backs. A market for the velvets had recently opened up and they were being processed into crab sticks but the soft-backs were thrown back in. Most of the lobsters were undersize – Graeme carefully measured each one before putting them back in. I didn’t see him take one that was even a millimetre undersize. Here was one fisherman who understood sustainability and that adhering to the regulations would only benefit them in the long run.

  Then the gas ran out. No more tea. That was worse than the poor catch. I began to feel like a Jonah. Then, out of the blue, we hauled a train further inshore that brought with it ten good lobsters – a prize indeed. Graeme had just been telling me that, at this time of year, three or four per train was average. Ten was amazing. But then the next train only had one. We moved towards Kingsbarns, just off the old harbour, where I was astonished later to read that a substantial fleet had once been based. It’s little more than a few stones protecting an exposed beach, but then this was the norm back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  Eventually all the creels in this area had been hauled and put back in. Most of the bait had gone. The box of lobsters was nearly full – twenty-five kilos according to Graeme, not bad. Two boxes of crabs and another of the velvets. And a dozen codling that had found their way into the creels. We headed back to harbour, the boat punching into the force 5 at a steady eight knots, spray cascading over the boat. But she never slammed once and I was impressed with her performance. The brothers were thinking about getting a bigger boat with better accommodation for when they’re at the prawns, but this one has certainly served them well.

  It’s not a glossy business, this fishing. Tedious, hard work and dangerous sums it up. So why do they do it? ‘Ah,’ they say in unison, ‘there’s no finer job when the weather’s good. When it’s bad it’s a real pain. We’ve done it, like our fathers and grandfathers, all our lives. And let’s face it, there’s nothing else to do around here. No work except for the sea.’

  Back in Pittenweem the crabs were nicked – the ligament to the claw cut – and all the crabs were put into keep pots and slung over the transom. The lobsters were carried ashore. I was gifted with fourteen crabs and the codling which friends and I feasted on that night. The harbour was quiet, the prawn boats making hay while the weather was good. After a week of gales the forecast was good. Fishing would be good over the days to come.

  Two months later and I was out lobster creeling again, this time aboard the St Andrews creeler Lena, DE21, owned by Tom Meldrum. It was a bright Sunday afternoon as the two of us motored out past the old stone harbour wall, from the end of which we were shouted to by two young women. ‘Give us a lift to Dundee,’ they pleaded, waving and jumping up and down. ‘We’re going fishing,’ we returned the shout. ‘Oh, yes please,’ they answered, but we smiled to each other and carried on.

  Tom’s boat is a Cygnus too, the 21ft version with a Saab engine which he’d had since 1964. He’d been creeling most of his life, he told me as we headed out to the first train. Yes, he was an all-year rounder, except during March and April when the boat came out of the water for an overhaul and his annual holiday to Crete. Then of course there was the constant repair to the creels. During the January storm he’d had fifty damaged or lost and another twenty or so the previous week. Consequently he’d only got seventy set – six or seven trains – so it would be a short day out.

  These trains came up easily except one end pot that refused to be dislodged from the seabed. Plenty of undersize here, and one adult. To make matters worse, he’d only had one on the previous trip two days ago. And no crabs whatsoever, and no white fish for tea!

  March is traditionally poor, progressively through the month as the cold water encourages the lobsters to stay put. The sea doesn’t even begin to warm up until the end of May, hence the reason for a two-month break. Then, of course, the part-timers would begin their annual fishing.

  We talked about the proposed shellfish licensing scheme and about the regulation code that Fife Council were hoping to introduce on the
Shetland model. The trouble was nobody was answering the fishermen’s queries, so, while the industry was facing collapse, nothing was getting implemented. And we talked about decommissioning, and how it’s not helping the industry one iota. While the older, less efficient boats are decommissioned out of the whitefish sector, the owners then buy into other areas. In Aberdeen, Tom told me, they’ve been buying modern creel boats with their grant money, flooding the market with lobsters which has only served to drive down the price. How does this help the industry overall?

  On the journey home we talked about the tiny shore landings between Kingsbarn and St Andrews. Just around the corner from our farthest train there’s a small creek at Boarhills where I’ve a photograph of one small yawl pulled up clear. Close by, there’s a salmon bothy on the shore, and a lifeboat house where the St Andrews lifeboat was sometimes launched from, after being hauled by horse from the town. Further west, at Kinkells, we motored close in by the Rock and Spindle, with sharp rocks protruding through the calm surface of the water. We imagined sailing ships creeping in at high tide, drying out to unload and what calamity would occur if a northeasterly gale sprang up. Such was the day of the sailing era that losses often went unnoticed and drowned seamen were as common as the wind that killed them.

  Back in St Andrews the tide was very high – in fact so high that Tom said he’d never seen the water so far up the stonewall, lapping the grass at one point. It was the highest tide of the year, but still, far higher than before, and that without northwesterly winds to prevent the ebb from escaping the North Sea. Global warming. That the lobsters are affected by the minute rise in sea temperature is another observation that might account for their dearth. But the juveniles were by no means unusual and he recounted how four years ago, he’d lifted 600 from his full assembly of 240 pots.