mark
Well-known member
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
