A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  Once past Orkney, the job of the ship was to locate the shoals. For us, the only appearances were those on the sonar screen. The lore of the natural appearances is of no consequence to these vessels. Alexander spent his time gazing into this screen and that, moving the range and angle controls of the sonar, altering course to chase a possible hit, and then to consider the viability of the shoal as the fish finder picked it up. Sometimes big red bubbles burst onto the screen, lingering above the seabed. I was instantly reminded of those speech bubbles we all used to read at one time in comics. These were herring, he assured me, but they were few and far between. Mostly the red bubbles hid on the seabed, in the troughs of the rocky uneven ground. For this is where these super-trawlers don’t have it all their own way. To set the net over this rough seabed would be likely to result in the loss of the gear, and at £28,000 a time this is deemed a risk too far. We steamed north to Foula, described by one crew-member as the ‘arse hole of the world’ such was its exposure from the North Atlantic. Still no fish, and then our neighbour boat, another pelagic trawler, the 1974-built Convallaria, BF58, developed steering problems. We altered course for Lerwick, on Shetland’s east coast.

  Bressay Sound, the piece of water that brushes Lerwick’s harbour, was once the centre of a vibrant herring fishery. In the days that the Dutch commanded the North Sea fishery, hundreds of their boats would be anchored here. It has been said that there were up to 2,000 Dutch craft here once, although many believe this figure to be exaggerated and 800 is considered more likely. It seems rather irrelevant perhaps, the important factor being the sheer strength of Holland’s grip upon the herring fishery. De Caux tells us that, in 1603, their catch was valued at £396,583 from 5,000 vessels, and that 200,000 people were involved in the taking of this fish. This seems a vast sum, and he himself does add that these figures should be taken with a large grain of salt.1

  After a brief interlude at Lerwick – a chance to look around was an added bonus – we sailed in the early morning at about three o’clock. As darkness fell at about one o’clock, a visible dawn appeared almost immediately. By three it was nearly daylight. A wonderful experience, and, although I’d experienced the same midnight sun in Finland, somehow here, especially off the west of Shetland, it was more memorable.

  We did eventually shoot the net, although I’ve forgotten which day it was on. They all seem to merge into one long day and short night, such was the routine. The only thing that was like clockwork was the feeding of the hungry stomachs, and each morning, anywhere between about ten and twelve o’clock, there was a call over the intercom of ‘right boys, breakfast is served in the dining room!’ As the normal cook had had to stay at home to go to his mother’s funeral, each crew took his turn at the galley. Somehow, though, I managed to avoid this duty, thankfully. The same call came in the evening for the main meal of the day. In between, cups of coffee and a smoke in the drying room.

  The first time we shot the net was at night. I remember it well, because the process involved the throwing of a line between the two boats. As it was our net that was to go over the side, Convallaria had to come close to us to receive the line, which then had one end of the net attached. Unfortunately, their skipper overestimated his run in, so that, as I gazed out from the side of the bridge, all I could see to my horror was the brightly lit ship poised about ten feet away from our side. Alexander shouted over the radio, and thankfully, Convallaria regressed into the darkness, but the episode was a stark reminder about the dangers of securing lines between the vessels to enable pair-trawling to take place. His second run was better, and, after several attempts, the line was across the heaving ocean and passed around their winch. Both ends of the net were cast, and the head ropes let out. This then gave me my first view of the complete net on the sonar screen, where the bottom of the net was clearly visible above the seabed. This height between ground and net was controlled by the winches, and, in theory, the net was streamed so that the green bubbles of herring (they were green on this screen, yet red on the fish finder) were swallowed by the open mouth, just like that infernal ‘Pac-man’ computer game that whizzes around a screen gulping up a score as it goes. But I was excited, as a constant stream of these bubbles was passing into the net and I anticipated tons and tons of herring. We trawled for a couple of hours before one of the sonic ‘eggs’ fired off, alerting us to the fact the net was filling. There were four of these eggs on the net, and once all four had fired the net was deemed full. We began hauling even though only one had gone off, yet I still imagined tons and tons of herring. Yet disappointingly there was only seven or eight tons, which wasn’t deemed enough to bother starting the pump, so it was discarded so that it just floated away across the sea: dead fish – seven tons of it at somewhere between £150 and £200 a ton? I didn’t begin to fathom the sense of this.

  Unfortunately, the net became all tangled up during this trawl, caused by problems in the winch mechanism aboard Convallaria. However, after a couple of hours, suitable repairs were made, so that we again commenced a trawl, this time using their net. The process of setting the net proceeded, with them passing their end of the net over the stern and sending the line over to us, it being then attached to our winch, and the other end of the net being cast off. The trawl was run out and we steamed along at about four knots. This time I couldn’t watch the action on the screen as this is only seen on the sonar set on the one boat whose net was in use. After a similar period as before, we hauled in, passing a line back to Convallaria to enable the net to be brought alongside the boat. Unfortunately, our skipper decided to head straight off to Lerwick once more, to disentangle the net ashore, such was the extent of the rat’s tail of entanglement. We passed through Bressay Sound once more, with its ghosts of the herring boats lurking beneath the surface. I took an instantaneous decision to catch the ferry back to Aberdeen, such was my uneasiness at taunts of being a Jonah. Yes, for certain, there was most definitely a dearth in herring, but, as Alexander pointed out, we had been fishing two weeks earlier than they had last year. And was I responsible for gear failure aboard Convallaria? But it wasn’t just that, as I realised I was weary. Not weary of tiredness, but weary of trying to convince myself that what was happening around me was somehow justified in the greater sense of fishing. Deep inside, I felt stirrings of dissatisfaction, a belief that I was party to a plundering process, and approving of it. I wasn’t, although I recognised that I didn’t have an alternative to offer. I’ve always believed that criticism is unjustified without the proffering of other options. It really was not a matter of returning to the old ways, no re-rigging our fishing boats with lugsails and single-cylinder petrol/paraffin engines! No turning back, but there must be some change of emphasis to ensure that tons and tons of perfectly good fish aren’t just thrown back into the sea. And is it acceptable to send hundreds of tons of fresh fish into fish meal and industrial uses? With a slightly heavy heart I said my farewells and caught the ferry, an expensive and disappointing experience, given poor food and a seemingly antiquated service aboard. Still, that’s another story for someone else.

  As I munched through the insubstantial fare I considered the statistics. Britain had a fleet of over 40,000 boats in the 1870s, and the boats over 40ft in length had fallen to 17,000 by 1920. This progressively shrunk until there were only 12,500 by 1950. Landings of herring also fell from a peak in 1913 when over half a million tons were landed that year. By 1950 only 176,300 tons were landed, 90 per cent of which went through Peterhead. By 1959 the total annual Lowestoft and Yarmouth landings equalled what would have arrived in one night. It seems that the English herring heyday, that had existed for centuries since Cerdick landed, was over.

  The next decade saw the introduction of the purse-seine-net from Norway as the last of the drift-net boats disappeared. The introduction of this aggressive method had by far the greatest impact upon herring stocks than any other single innovation. A continuous net up to 2,000m long is set in deep water around a suspected shoal, and the bot
tom rope is progressively tightened to form a pond with the fish inside. Once this is so tight that the fish are just a seething mass, the herring is pumped into the tanks. Catches of 1,000 tons were reported in one catch. Not surprisingly this had a drastic effect upon the North Sea herring stock. In 1965 it was reported that 259 Norwegian pursers caught 615,000 tons off Shetland when the entire British landings were only 100,000 tons. Total landings that year rose to 1.2 million tons, nearly double its average for the previous decade. Over the next ten years catches fell dramatically until it was estimated that 70 per cent of the entire stock was being removed year on year. With landings down to 200,000 tons in 1975 political pressure finally brought about a response, as, two years later, the North Sea herring was closed. The west coast of Scotland followed suit the following year. The excesses of some fishermen returned to haunt everyone.

  A partial recovery was reported in 1981, when it was reopened. Landings rose once more to 800,000 tons, but has fallen back a considerable amount in recent years. Purse-seines have waned in favour of the mid-water trawl. 1998 quotas for Britain were: North Sea 38,910 tons; Clyde 1,000 tons and west coast 46,360 tons. Ironically, 1999 saw a world glut with the landings up 157 per cent as a result of the Russian and Asian financial collapses. Herring that was a few years earlier selling at £450 a tonne was down to £105. It took a few years to stabilise but, in 2013, herring stocks were labelled as being healthy in most parts though the west of Scotland, and Ireland and the Irish Sea are at a level where they are overfished but still open for fishing. The 2013 Total Allowable Catch (TAC) for North and Norwegian Seas herring was 478,000 tons, of which the UK quota was 70,965 tons.

  But what went wrong with fishing when entry into the Common Fisheries Policy was meant to protect stocks on the advice of scientists from ICES, the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas, the oldest intergovernmental organisation in the world concerned with marine and fisheries advice.

  First, let’s explain the basic system. TACs are set by the European Commission and their politicians on advice from fishermen and scientists. Take herring, for example, in 2013. The main UK catch was in the North Sea as mentioned above. However, the total TAC for herring was 1,387,538 tons, of which the EU fleet had 753,982 tons. This was split between the countries of the EU. Denmark has the highest total quota of 145,133 tons, Finland 104,897 tons and the UK 100,837 tons, and so on. The UK quota was again split up and allocated to various companies and boats in line with the size of the boat, the fishing capability and other factors such as the amount of money they paid for access to quota. Sounds a nightmare – it is. For each stock the same applies and the annual allocation at the Council of Ministers in December has become a horse-trading affair and, let’s admits it, a farce. The problem is the Common Fisheries Policy. Whereas Norway and Iceland have healthy fisheries, Europe does not.

  Why not then? In the author’s opinion it is simply down to the massive scale that the Common Fisheries Policy attempts to regulate over. Is it right that 78 per cent of the British fleet receive such a small percentage of the quota as in the case of the small ‘under tens’ fleet? On average their share of the quota is 4 per cent, down to 1.2 per cent in the North Sea (ICES area IV) and 7 per cent in the English Channel, Western Approaches, Celtic Sea and Irish Sea (ICES area VII). How can that be justified for fishers from coastal communities who have relied upon the fisheries for generations?2

  Whereas Norway and Iceland have an almost complete control over their own fisheries over an area adjacent to their coasts, the European Union attempts to direct and regulate over what is in fact a huge area of contrasts, individual customs and cultural traditions. From the Mediterranean, along the Atlantic seaboard and through the Bay of Biscay, the Western Approaches, Western Ireland and Scotland, the Irish and North Seas, English Channel, throughout the whole of the Baltic and over parts of the northern Atlantic, this body of bureaucrats exercises various tools that assume to encompass all the different cultures that share this huge expanse of sea. This they call the common access which, in reality, is an excuse for a common plundering. Norway, although it has many agreements with the EU over some areas such as the North Sea, has been much more forward over the last twenty years in bringing in legislation to make some inroads into the problem of overfishing.

  The EU has relied upon the ill-fated quota system to maintain stocks over the last thirty years and has failed miserably. To this they have added a ‘days at sea’ policy, thus reducing the amount of time fishers can fish and have introduced ‘selective gear’ whereby technology improves net design. Then they have decommissioned fishing boats to reduce the fishing fleet with the result being that, although the numbers of fishing boats have gone down, public money has been used to produce a fishing fleet that is much more efficient and therefore capable of taking the same amount of fish from the sea as it did with a higher number of more inefficient fishing vessels. And, as a consequence of an enforced scrapping policy, this has seen many of the older, some historically sensitive, fishing boats disappearing altogether. Alongside all these measures, the fleet has been ‘discarding’ thousands of tons of fish while at sea when they have landed too much of a particular species. The law-makers in the EU have known about this for thirty years yet have, until very recently, been unwilling to actually do anything about it. Over those years hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of tons of good fish have been discarded, to pollute as the vast majority do not survive.

  Norway, on the other hand, implemented a different approach to the discards of fish, banning it in 1987. However, this ban was part of a comprehensive package of policies to minimise discards even if they believed it would be almost impossible to eradicate them completely. They adopted a process of ‘closed areas’ while also bringing measures to counter ‘high grading’, by which vessels discard smaller, legally sized fish when they catch larger fish that fetch higher rates at market. Although no one measure can solve the problem of overfishing, a mixture of obliging fishermen to move grounds when they have exceeded allowable by-catches or found undersized fish, closing areas and making fishermen themselves responsible for informing the authorities if they believe an area is being overfished, can help. Surveillance of the boats contributes but one measure that encourages fishermen in the white fish sector is the compensation scheme for fishermen who land fish caught unintentionally in contravention of the regulations. Instead of the State receiving the economic value of fish caught in this way, in order to show loyalty to fishermen, 20 per cent of the value is retained by them if it is established that the illegal catch was taken unintentionally. Other measures exist to avoid over-quota fish in the pelagic sector.3

  A fishing boat lies rotting away at Applecross, on Scotland’s west coast, perhaps a pointer for times to come as fish stocks are wiped out by corporate greed.

  Iceland, too, uses various control measures as well as enforcement to maintain the responsible management of its fisheries. As in Norway, discards are banned and all catches must be landed. Extensive provisions are made for the temporary closures of fishing areas to protect spawning fish from all fishing and well as areas of other vulnerable habitats. Some of the closures are permanent – as off the north and northwest coasts where fishing by bottom trawl, mid-water trawl and the Danish seine is not permitted within 12 miles of the coast and around other parts of the coast where trawling is restricted to smaller vessels within the 12 miles – while other closures are temporary and even seasonal. Furthermore, Iceland has one of the most sophisticated enforcement regimes in the world, in particular regarding port control and the weighing of all catches. Ever since the 1970s when Iceland extended its 200-mile limit (the same limit as Norway), its fisheries have been closely monitored. Before the extension, foreign boats were catching over 100,000 tons of fish a year in these waters from Icelandic stock, and this was estimated to be about a third of its cod stock, a quarter of its haddock stock, and half of the total catches of saithe and redfish.4 No wonder they wrested contr
ol over these waters, otherwise the foreign, mostly European, vessels would have wiped out the complete stock. However, these days, both Norway and Iceland have managed to create sustainable fisheries around their coasts while the European Union, and its Common Fisheries Policy, continues to fail. Europe simply would be unable to efficiently enforce similar effort controls with any hope of success because of the areas of sea involved. It tries, poor thing, but the will-power just is not there.

  And so, while the fisheries in its waters around its shores continue to decline, the European Union vessels fish further afield. Today’s European Commissioner for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Maria Damanaki, has recently made the announcement that, ‘We will not fish in any other waters in a way that we will not fish in our own waters.’ Judging by the way the EU has acted over the last thirty years, they look to be about to continue the absolute plundering of fishing grounds around the globe and that, added to the antics of other countries worldwide (Russia, China and Japan for a start), does not bode well for fish stocks around the planet in the coming decades!

  Notes

  1 De Caux, J.W., The Herring and the Herring Fishery, with chapters on ‘Fishes and Fishing’ and ‘Our Sea Fisheries in the Future’, London 1881

  2 Emma Cardwell, ‘Invisible Fishermen, The Rise and Fall of the British Small Boat Fleet’, in Thomas Højrup and Klaus Schriewer (eds), European Fisheries at Tipping Point, Murcia, Spain, 2012.

  3 www.fisheries.no/resource_management

  4 www.fisheries.is/management/fisheries-management

  COPYRIGHT

  First published in 2015

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port