Marine Protected Areas - here's a few courtesy of the Oil and Gas industry - oh, did you forget to mention them Hugh?

North Sea Oil - How did it get here?

It may seem surprising that the Oil industry has waited until recently to explore the coast of the British Isles for any oil or gas deposits. A shallow water area such as the North Sea would almost certainly yield some Oil or Gas and it had been a matter of conjecture for some years that oil and gas deposits could be found and exploited. In the mid 1960s real efforts were made to explore the Southern part of the North Sea and in 1965 hydrocarbons were found. A brief history of this exciting time can be found at The History page.

The North West European Geological garden which has been dug over hundreds of millions of years by erosion, deposition, uplifting and then more erosion. At the present time the North Sea is part of the depositional basin collecting the debris brought down by large European rivers. In times past this sea stretched halfway across Britain and Holland whilst at other times the North Sea was itself land.

About 250 million years ago the sea area which was collecting sediment stretched right across the UK Midlands, through the North Sea's present location and far into Holland and Germany.

For more information check out this excellent site.

It's a little fresh out west

She might be a big boat but it won't be too comfortable aboard the Irish Fisheries Research Vessel Celtic Explorer currently dodging on the Porcupine Bank!

Fancy a trip hake netting?

Ajax_Wife Anyone available to go to sea until Monday with @Ajax_Hake ? Netting experience essential DM me please if your interested

The gill netter Ajax is looking for someone to do at trip - calling any fishermen who fancy a week on the hake!

Email for more info or contact the boat direct through the web site.

Europe’s Rift on Overfishing and Subsidies

Good to see the New York Times covering what goes on over this side of the pond with this well crafted piece by David Jolly:

Two weeks ago, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to require that the 27-nation bloc’s fisheries be managed on a sustainable basis within a few years.

That vote, the first step toward overhauling Europe’s Common Fisheries Policy, was hailed by conservationists as a major victory. It was made possible by the Lisbon Treaty, an agreement that put the Parliament on an equal footing with the European Fisheries Council – a body made up of ministers from member nations – in setting policy.
This week the Parliament began to debate the second half of the so-called Common Fisheries Policy reform, addressing the thorny question of how to ensure that the subsidies that Europe pays out to the fishing industry don’t wind up encouraging the same practices that it wants to end.

One thing quickly became clear: despite the margin of victory – 502 to 137 — in the previous vote, victory for the pro-conservation camp is far from guaranteed in a decision on a proposed European Maritime and Fisheries Fund.

“We won a huge victory for sustainability two weeks ago with a huge majority,” Isabella Lovin, a Green party legislator from Sweden and a longtime critic of European fisheries subsidies, said by telephone. “You would expect the subsidies vote to go the same way. But I’m not sure we’ll have such a big victory when it comes to money.”

“My worry is that there is an unholy alliance of between the conservatives and the left,” she added, “one that wants to continue giving subsidies.”

The fight to change the basic rules two weeks ago was led by Ulrike Rodust, a German Socialist who served as the rapporteur, or parliamentary leader, with responsibility for representing Parliament in final negotiations with fisheries ministers in Brussels. On Monday, Ms. Rodust articulated the position of many subsidy foes when she said there that no money should be provided to build new boats when there was already an excess of capacity.

While Ms. Rodust is firmly in the conservationist camp, the rapporteur on subsidies is Alain Cadec, a Frenchman from Brittany who opposed the fisheries regulation vote on the ground that it was “dogmatic and populist.”

Mr. Cadec, a member of the Union for a Popular Movement, the party of the former president Nicolas Sarkozy, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he was seeking “a major evolution” in the way that Europe aids the fishing industry but that he did not want to end subsidies, especially for for building new boats. “The average age of the European fleet is 27 years,’ he said.

Fishermen should get funds to build new vessels, he added, but with controls to “ensure that fishing capacity isn’t augmented.”

“My objective is to have a sustainable fishery and maintain the European model of fishing,” Mr. Cadec said. “It’s an important activity, socially and economically.”

The bloc’s fisheries policy has long been the target of wrath for conservationists and taxpayer advocates. In the conservationists’ case, it is because the policy has contributed to a system in which 68 percent of European fish stocks are overexploited, according to the Parliament’s Fisheries Committee. From the taxpayer advocates’ view, it is simply economically inefficient.

Fishing is a hard, dangerous and uncertain business, and subsidies can make the difference between success or failure for the operators, not to mention the communities that depend on them. But that is another way of saying that the money keeps unprofitable boats going out after fewer fish.

The European Court of Auditors, an independent agency that monitors European Union spending, found in a 2011 study that the subsidy policy was so poorly planned that from 1992 to 2008, despite an official policy of reducing the fleet to match capacity with shrinking stocks, capacity actually rose by about 14 percent.

Bloom Association, a French nongovermental organization, said last week that it had examined the finances of France’s largest fishing company, Scapêche, for the period from 2004 to 2011 and had learned that the company had 19 million euros, or $25 million, of recurring losses in those years, despite receiving about 10 million euros of subsidies and millions of euros in debt relief and other aid from its parent.

Scapêche, a unit of the Intermarché supermarket group, did not reply to requests for comment.

But in a statement carried by Le Marin, a French magazine, Intermarché contested that characterization, saying that Scapêche “has had positive results since 2009.” Aid given to European fishing “aims at improving the sector” with best fishing practices, best product quality and safety for fishermen, and all such aid “is accorded in complete transparency,” it said.

A 2011 report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that Spanish boats alone had received more than 5.8 billion euros, or $7.7 billion, in subsidies over the previous decade – nearly one-third of the industry’s total value.

“Simply put, nearly one in three fish caught on a Spanish hook or raised in a Spanish farm is paid for with public money,” the authors said.

Maria Damanaki, the European fisheries commissioner, pointed out one of the seemingly irrational elements of the policy in a speech last October, noting that by 2015 fishermen will have received nearly 1.3 billion euros in so-called scrapping subsidies, under which vessel owners were paid to decommission boats that were used to catch overfished stocks.

But in many cases, she said, the goal was defeated as they used the money to buy new boats, meaning the payout “was a hidden investment aid in many cases.”

The money doesn’t all come from the European Union kitty. Oceana, a conservation group, reckons that European fishermen also get about 1.4 billion euros a year ($1.86 billion) in fuel tax subsidies from their home country taxpayers.

Still, when push comes to shove, fishermen, like farmers, hold significant political power, and pork-barrel politics creates a sort of inertia. Members of the European Parliament have added 2,800 amendments to the body’s subsidies proposal, and Mr. Cadec will have his hands full whittling those down to a manageable number in the next few weeks in preparation for an April vote.

Subsidies are necessary “to allow fishers to live in dignity,” Maria do Céu Patrão Neves, a European People’s Party legislator from Portugal, said in Parliament.

“The watchword ought to be fishing better,” she said. “By training fishermen to better handle their catches, “they won’t feel the need to fish more, to overfish.”
Story in courtesy of the New York Times.

Existing closed areas in the North Sea - which HFW failed to even mention!

From John Clark, skipper of the Reliance II

HAVE A LOOK AT MY PLOTTER ON MY BOAT..THIS IS JUST SOME OF THE CONSERVATION AREAS WE HAVE CLOSED OFF FOR FISHING.THIS ONLY COVERS NE SCOTLAND...TO THE WATERS WEST OF SCOTLAND WHICH ARE CLOSED I COULD NOT FIT THEM IN MY SCREEN.....

That most dashing of sea birds the gannet - plastic waste in the Pacific

MIDWAY : trailer : a film by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.

The MIDWAY film project is a powerful visual journey into the heart of an astonishingly symbolic environmental tragedy. On one of the remotest islands on our planet, tens of thousands of baby albatrosses lie dead on the ground, their bodies filled with plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch. Returning to the island over several years, our team is witnessing the cycles of life and death of these birds as a multi-layered metaphor for our times.

Here's an infographic from Jessica Wallace along similar lines 

Fisheries MEPs pave the way for first discard ban in the EU

Fisheries Committee MEPs backed a proposed ban on discarding unwanted fish of 35 species caught in the Skagerrak (between the North Sea and the Baltic) in a vote on Tuesday. The ban, to take effect gradually between 2014 and 2016, would be enforced with a remote electronic monitoring system. The discard ban regulation would oblige fishing vessels to land all caught fish in order to halt "discards" - the practice of throwing fish back into the sea, usually because they are of an unwanted species or size. Most discarded fish die, which is wasteful and aggravates overfishing.

At the same time, the proposals drafted by Werner Kuhn (EPP, DE), aim to fill a gap left by the revocation of an international fisheries agreement on the Skagerrak, inter alia by harmonising EU rules with those of Norway, where a discard ban is already in place.

Remote monitoring by CCTV

To enforce the discard ban, member states would be required to set up a remote electronic monitoring system to supervise fishing in the Skagerrak, which is bound by Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

For the system to work, boats over 12 metres long would have to be equipped with closed circuit TV (CCTV), GPS and transmitting equipment.

Financial aid for this should be granted from the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund, say MEPs, who also insist that the system should be automated and use image recognition software for better data protection.

Pilot scheme

Plans to ban discards in all EU waters were backed by the European Parliament in a plenary vote on the new Common Fisheries Policy in February. Experience in the Skagerrak should provide useful lessons on how best to enforce the obligation to land all catches made in EU waters

As a previous international agreement on fishing in the Skagerrak no longer applies, boats must abide by the rules of the state in whose territorial waters they are fishing, and harmonising the relevant EU and Norwegian laws should facilitate compliance.

The new measures will apply to all EU member states which have fishing rights in the EU part of the Skagerrak, i.e. boats from Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as Denmark,, Sweden and Norway.

Next steps

The draft report on certain technical and control measures in the Skagerrak is scheduled for a first reading vote at the April plenary session. The regulation will then need the member states' green light to enter into force from 2014, possibly after reaching a first-reading agreement with Parliament.