Fisheries evaluations

FY57 Foxy Lady hand-lining and trammel netting

Wed, 6 May 2009 10:12:18 +0100

Willie Hunt works single-handed, going a few hundred meters out from his mooring in Coverack Bay, and in early May combines mackerel hand lining along with a few hundred meters of set nets. He has a reputation for looking after the quality of the fish, uses ice, and delivers mostly to the Beans a few miles up the road. This was our first trip out to see what he does and how he does it.
Click on pictures to go to photo documentary
Rewards are limited on a small boat, but so are costs. Providing - crucially - you have the skill to maintain a more or less steady daily flow you can make some sort of a living: Perhaps a few monk, a smattering of other fish of reasonable size, and some crabs, along with a few exceptional days to balance out the washouts.
The weather was anything but promising. Strong south westerly winds had put a stop to most fishing, but there was just enough shelter in Coverack Bay, on the south east of the Lizard peninsula, to make a go of it in a small boat.
To start off, with the mackerel hand-lining, it looked like it was going to be as bad as the weather. Unlike with Richard Ede two days before further west, there was no rush of fish around dawn, and never more than singletons of small to medium size, which were placed in ice slush in a cooler box. We started at five and knocked it on the head at 6.20 GMT.
A quick cup of coffee and Willie then switched to retrieving the first of two trammel nets in the Bay, which had been out for 48 hours. Almost immediately a large plaice was taken, followed by a large cock crab, but after that it was downhill, with only a few spider crabs in the remainder of the net. The plaice was gutted, washed in the sea, and joined the mackerel in the ice, and the net was shot.
Time for a roll-up and some speculation about whether this was indeed going to be a washout, and then on to retrive the second net. The day was saved with three monkfish. On such events do fortune turn.
Operating nets singlehanded is not easy, requiring the constant switching attention between extracting fish from the nets and keeping a wary eye on what the net hauler is bringing up (so it doesn’t get crushed under the wheel). But, apart from a few more crabs, that was about it, by 7.40 GMT. The monks were tailed, the top going to the gulls and the tails into the ice. Then the second net was shot, and it was time to clean away the accumulated seaweed and mess, wash down oilskins, and head for the mooring.
The punt was loaded up and it was a short row from the mooring just off the tiny harbour at Coverack.

Cornish May hand-lining SS22 Inspiration

Mon, 4 May 2009 02:30:44 +0100

Richard Ede has fished from the Mediterranean to the Western Isle but in May 2009 he was hand-lining, in its simplest, most traditional form, for mackerel in a restored wooden boat off the Cornish south coast just shy of Lands End.
Click on pictures to go to photo documentary
Dick uses a simple hand line and a life-time of experience. There were perhaps ten other boats in sight as dawn broke. The fishing was quiet, and gradually most of the others shifted en-mass out to sea. This meant nothing to Dick who stuck his ground. Whether by luck or judgement, when a gannet arrived it was around Dick’s boat where it started diving for fish, and we started catching mackerel.
That’s not unusual. It’s not for nothing that his friends call him ‘Mad Dick’. He’ll have an idea and will stick to it through thick and thin, regardless of what others think, and in a way that defies pigeon-holing. So, he’s shocked at any idea of killing seals, and vehemently insists that icing ruins the fish, instead dousing the mackerel in the locker at intervals with sea water (They do get iced as soon as landed). We’ll have to take him up on his word, and do a chef’s blind tasting of mackerel with and without sea icing. One gets the sense that offering a higher price for icing isn’t going to be a winning argument, any more than providing all the necessary equipment was.
By past standards the catch, of two boxes, was small. To make matters worse, the price is also very low, at 30 pence a kilo, knocked down in part due to the ready availability of Scottish purse seined mackerel which, now also a MSC certified fishery, removes one advantage the Cornish hand-liners had. Dick would have been lucky to have seen £20 for his catch. If mackerel was scarce, in terms of taste, there can be no doubt it would be one of the most valuable fish around.
However, the Inspiration – a new venture for 2009 for Dick, and Nick Howell (of Newlyn Pilchard Works fame) emphasising traditional small scale techniques – is not reliant on mackerel hand lining. They are currently making up a set of traditional whithy inkwell lobster pots. Dick is one of the few remaining with the skills to work with willow. They will also be long lining and possibly working with fish traps.
We will be back to see how they are getting on!

Lucy Marianna FY239 Fal Bay netting

Sat, 2 May 2009 08:32:42 +0100

Lucy Marianna is a sister ship to the Lady Hamilton, build in the mackerel boom years of the early 70s. While slightly longer and slightly differently laid out, she also nets in Fal Bay. Anthony Hoskin uses ice and lands the best part of the catch with the neighbouring Beans.
Click on pictures to go to photo documentary
This was our first trip out with the Lucy Marianna, and a gap in the weather, which had been (and was shortly to resume) being unseasonably cold and windy, making the fish less active and delaying the season.
First the gill nets were set at 80 m, and we then went on to retrive the first set of monk nets, which has been down for 48 hours. This was virtually empty apart from a few crabs five large cod and a cuckoo ray. The second net was largely clear of fish, but there was one young grey seal. This was the first marine mammal death that I had encounter since starting the project in 2004. Earlier accounts, contained in report commissioned by Invest in Fish SW, for boats based at Mevagissey, indicated catch rates of 1-3 per boat per year, so this was not entirely unexpected but did cast a silence on the boat.
In the third set of monk nets, the catches increased, and included a handful of turbot, while the fourth included significant numbers of cock brown crabs and spider crabs. Each net was re-set after clearing the fish.
We then returned to the gill net set earlier in the morning. Sections of this were coated with a mucilaginous slime, possibly making the net more visible, and certainly containing few fish. Other sections contained a few cod, three red gurnard, perhaps 50 lesser spotted dogfish. Then, in the second part of the net, a large number of pout were present, along with a few whiting.
Ice was used on all the high value fish, but the volume of pout caught was unexpected and the amount of ice carried was insufficient. These were sorted, the larger fish went into ice and the smaller fish into seawater or a basket for those intended for pot bait.
A second trip was planed for the following week but abandoned due to adverse weather and pressure of time. The evaluation continues.

Lady Hamilton joins pinger trial

Fri, 1 May 2009 05:00:00 +0100

The Beans operate one of five small inshore fishing boats that have joined a Cornish Wildlife Trust experiment to attach ‘pingers’ to nets. Pingers are electronic devices that make noises intended to deter dolphins and porpoises from getting too close to nets and getting entangled.
Click on pictures to go to photo documentary
Cornwall is a UK hotspot for cetatean (dolphin, porpoise and whale) stranding, with some 100-200 being recorded each year over the last decade, mostly of common dolphins and porpoises, and mostly on the south coast. Where autopsies have been done, over half show signs of death in fishing gear, with no trend since 1990.
In the English Channel, the fishing method of recent concern to organisations such as Greenpeace is pair trawling for bass, which catches dolphins also feeding on the bass. A report commissioned by Invest in Fish SW noted that monofilament nets (such as offshore hake gill nets) can kill dolphins and porpoises, and that pingers can be associated with a major reduction. The IiF SW report gave anecdotal evidence of lower numbers for inshore fisheries - 2-3 per boat per year - but there is obvious concern about the cumulative effects. In any case, nobody wants to kill dolphins (gill-net fishers don’t have any dislike of cetaceans, because - unlike seals - they are not believed to eat fish in nets).
Pingers are not cheap, and the Cornwall Wildlife Trust raised an astonishing £18,000 from a public appeal for the pinger trial, in addition to funds from Defra and Esmée Fairbairn.
It is good that the Lady Hamilton is involved in the trial, as it must be one of the most active boats in the Falmouth Bay area. The nets believed most likely to catch cetaceans is ‘monk gear’; big meshed nets that lie on the seabed in deeper water (in Lady Hamilton’s case around 60m) intended to entangle larger fish such as monk and turbot. Depending on the season, the Lady Hamilton might have up to 10 km of monk nets in the water at any one time, rotating and retrieving them every 2-3 days.
For the experiment two sets of nets have been equipped with pingers at regular intervals, and another matched pair, without pingers, will always be set at the same time, to act as a comparison. The pingers had been deployed for the first time two days before, and this trip was to retrive them. We came along to see the result, which was a good one, if not unexpected – no cetaceans in either the ‘pinger’ nets or the controls. Indeed we fervently hope that this aspect of the experiment is a failure, with no dolphins caught in nets with or without pingers. So far, we’ve not been on board a boat that has then caught a cetacean.
However, there is another dimension to this experiment, which is that additional devices, that record the sounds made by cetaceans – ‘T-PoDs’ are also being deployed with the gear with and without pingers. This may give some clues as to their reactions and behaviour in the vicinity of pinger and pinger-less gear, even if no cetaceans are caught.
However, perhaps with a sense of the occasion, a party of five common dolphins did turn up to accompany the Lady Hamilton during the day. The pinger-less gear was being hauled, when the dolphins appeared on the port bow, starting some 100 m off, and last seen 400 m off, still ahead of the bow. And then, around 9.45 am, a party of five (the same?) turned up alongside the boat after the last (wreck) nets, set earlier that day, had been retrieved and the catch of whiting was being extracted. This is when the photos here, and in the photo documentary, were taken.
Apart from all of the excitement with the dolphins and the pinger experiment, there was another reason for going out on the Lady Hamilton, which was that it was three years since our last visit. Since then, with her supply to Pisces Responsible Fish Restaurants well established, we had been prioritising gathering information on other fisheries in other parts of the country. However it was now time to go back and start to review whether any conditions had changed in the operation of the Lady Hamilton.
Initial Opinion >

Sustainable Access to Inshore Fisheries Project

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 09:30:23 +0100

This is a Defra funded project, where 31 English inshore boats have been given licence to fish without restriction, in return for providing detailed statistics on the size of fish caught (retained and discards) along with date, time and location. Bill Pinney and the Jolene are one of the lucky participating boats.
Click on pictures to go to photo documentary
This work, which also involves Cefas, MFA and Seafish, was underway during our second visit to continue our sustainability and fish quality evaluation of the Jolene (the first visit was in February). Like the earlier research on thornback tagging and measuring (see our initial opinion on the Jolene, below), this greatly helps the confidence we have in our own assessment. And for our assessment, as well as generally building up our experience and confidence in the fishery, we wanted to see what size the cod were at end of the cod fishing season (it ends as the seasonal build-up of lesser spotted dogfish, taking the bait, make the fishery uneconomic). We also wanted to continue observing whether any seabirds grabbed the bait as it was set, and drowned.
The Defra project provides vital basic information on the size of fish retained and discarded, from which much can be told about the state of the local stocks, detail which is usually missing from inshore fisheries. The length of a random sample of 30 cod, of all 17 thornbacks, and one bass, all retained as catch, were recorded, as was the length of all cod and thornbacks discarded. For the Jolene measuring the discards was easy. Just three cod were discarded (36, 38 and 45 cm long - all above the minimum legal landing size). As these were taken from shallow water, they probably had a good chance of surviving. Seven lively thornbacks were returned (40, 43, 45, 51, 52, 52 and 53 cm long) and 17 retained, measuring between 62-84 cm, with a mean around 70 cm. The retained cod ranged from 50 to 78 cm, with a mean length just over 60 cm. The one bass caught was 47 cm long. You can see a photo of the tallied measuring board in the photo documentary. All lesser spotted dogfish and smooth hounds (both species) were flicked off the hook and returned without coming on board.
So far as fish quality goes, we returned to the first fishing mark after 1 hr 15 minutes, the fish were again gutted immediately upon capture and kept in seawater tanks until boxing up. No ice was used when boxed. It would have been 45-60 minutes between boxing and transfer to the onland chilled storage.
Compared to February, there was a far greater proportion of cod to thornback, but this was partly the result of the fishing location. See the February account for details on long line thornback size selectivity, and a summary of ICES advice (International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, responsible for international stock assessments) on North Sea cod and southern North Sea thornback stock status. The link to our initial opinion on the Jolene is at the bottom of this page
In February, we noticed kittiwakes nibbling at the bait before the line sank. We didn’t think it was likely to be an issue, but thought it important to keep this under review. On this occasion only a few herring gulls were around, and showed virtually no interest in the bait. Bill also commented that it was very rare for birds to take the bait. As the photo documentary shows, it was a totally different matter when the offal was discarded (outside the fishing area) when a vast flock of herring and lesser black-backed gulls materialised in an instant.
Initial Opinion >