Singing with Sole! Fishwives choir gets boost when Newlyn girl Hannah joins up

A NEWLYN singer whose family are steeped in the port's fishing heritage has agreed to join a national choir that hopes to replicate the success of The Fishermen's Friends and The Military Wives.

Hannah Pascoe, who sings as a soloist with the Mousehole and Holman's Climax Male Voice Choirs, Penzance Choral Society and Duchy Operatic Society, will travel up to Sussex on Thursday to join up with 40 women who have never met - and most of whom have never sung! ​

Operatic singer and fishermen's wife, sister and daugher, Hannah Pascoe has joined the Fishwives Choir They will spend two days rehearsing a newly penned fishing song none of them have heard before and then two days recording in a professional studio. The hope is that they will then go on to climb the charts - raising awareness of the work of The Fishermen's Mission as they go.

The Fishwives Choir was created by Essex fisherman's widow Jane Dolby, whose trawlerman husband Colin was lost at sea in 2008 in a freak storm. The 40 women, from as far away as Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and are all from fishing families and many have lost men at sea. Hannah hasn't, but she felt that it was worth giving the choir a helping hand after they put out a national call for volunteers. The mother-of-one from Newlyn said: "My dad Denys is a fisherman and three of my four brothers – Andrew, David and James – are fishermen." Fishing goes back many generations in the Pascoe family and even Hannah's husband, Ryan Ladd, is an auctioneer for Stevensons', and has a boat he uses to fish for mackerel in the summer.

Hannah said: "The aim of the choir is to raise awareness for the Mission. When I was thinking about whether to join the Choir I spoke to Sue Hendricks from Perranporth who lost her husband.

"She said that without a body the authorities won't issue a death certificate and so she was in limbo with no way to get money or change bank payments. That is the same situation for many women who lose their husbands at sea and that is when The Fishermen's Mission steps in. "A lot of people see the Mission in Newlyn as a place for the older men to go and play pool, but it's an important part of the community and does a lot for fishermen, so I thought I should do my bit."

Hannah will travel up to Hastings with mother Mary who will help babysit two-year-old daughter Molly while Hannah sings. She said: "I'm not sure what to expect, it could be fantastic or it could be quite scary, but I've already met Sue and her daughter Jenny Ansell and they are both lovely and we got on straight away.

"All of the women will have something in common so I'm sure we'll all get along." Hannah is one of just three Cornish women joining the choir, and she wasn't initially sure about whether to take part either because of the travel and cost of being involved.

But she said a peculiar coincidence tipped the balance.

"When I spoke to Sue from Perranporth she said the boat her husband owned before he died was the Lamorna. That boat actually now belongs to my brothers Andrew and James and they fish her out of Newlyn. When I heard that I decided it must be some sort of sign that I had to go up there!" The Fishwives Choir are already getting TV and radio coverage and Hannah's story is due to feature on ITV in the next few days.

Learn more about the Fishwives Choir at www.facebook.com/thefishwiveschoir and follow the girls on twitter at www.twitter.com/fishwiveschoirs

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Counting Fish!

Looking across the pond to see what we can learn from the USA.

Counting Fish 101 by Center for American Progress

Turbot charged!

The scourge of the oceans, visiting Fowey registered scalloper, Man Ranger sports new colours...

time to clear up aboard the Sea Spray happy to be back hand lining for pollack...

another messy job gets underway...

sporting a mere 6 dredges a side, as compared to the 27 a side worked by the grown-up scallopers...

cracking trip of inshore fish from skipper Nigel on the Inishallen...

prime pollack from the Sea Spray...

and a handful of sharks from the netters...

just some of the big white fish from the netter Ajax...

alongside these cracking inshore, cod, monk, turbot and ray from the Lizard boys...

yet more tallies from top merchants Ocean Fish...

sizzling suppers to be...

stacked two high, cracking turbot trip from the Gary M...

so fresh that the bleed is still fresh on the tail - turbot are bled in order to prevent the hallmark pristine white flesh from being discoloured...

just a little reminder from the harbour office over parking - you have been warned it seems!

Fishing mortality in freefall - the trend is bucked

The International Council for Exploration of the Sea (ICES)’s most recent advice has confirmed that fishing pressure across the main commercial stocks has fallen to a remarkable degree.

This graph in the ICES advice illustrates vividly how after something like 70 years of incremental increases in fishing mortality (F), the trends after the year 2000 have taken a dramatic dive. This fall in fishing pressure coincides closely with the period during which an array of “cod recovery” measures were applied to EU fleets, although many other factors are undoubtedly involved.

Fishing mortality in the demersal and benthic stocks has been halved since 2000.

The fall in fishing mortality is remarkable in that it applies to all of the three main species groups pelagic (including herring and mackerel), demersal (including cod, haddock and whiting) and benthic (the flatfish including sole and plaice). It also applies right across the whole of the North East Atlantic area, including the North Sea and Baltic and waters around the UK.

Although the development of the pelagic stocks has taken a different course from the benthic and demersal, they are now rapidly catching up.

ICES summarises the situation: Fishing Mortality for benthic stocks gradually increased over time until about year 2000 and have since reduced substantially. For demersal stocks the increase was steeper in the beginning of the time period, peaked around year 2000 and has reduced since. The pelagic stocks have had a very different development over time. F increased significantly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This resulted in the well known collapse of several important herring and mackerel stocks. Since then, F has been quite low and stable and like for the other two types of stocks, has decreased since year 2000.

In many respects this development will come as no great news to many fishermen who have seen the fishing fleets reduced by decommissioning, consolidation and attrition, to the extent that previously busy fishing grounds are now quite deserted. But it is important to acknowledge the significance of the fact that this trend is now established in scientific opinion and also to consider its implications.

Implications

The clear shift to a lower fishing mortality rate brings with it the need rethink the way we approach both fisheries advice and fisheries management. When the overwhelming concern was to reduce fishing pressure because it was such a dominant factor, there was little need to think too deeply about multi-species interactions – they didn’t really come fully into play. But now that the impact of fishing has been reduced, the need to consider predation patterns and cannibalism becomes much more urgent. ICES' view is that stocks can become so large that they deplete their food sources and eventually eat their own kind. It is necessary therefore to think about the next steps in advice and management: It may be that it will be necessary to increase fishing pressure on some species to achieve an optimum balance. ICES has been working for 30 years on multi-species models. These can now be put to use to inform management decisions.

Another implication lies in the realm of public perceptions. “We all know that fish stocks are collapsing”, has become such an automatic media refrain that it has been difficult for the public to understand that things have changed. But changed they have. North Sea cod, the iconic fish and chips species, is rebuilding steadily to safe biological levels; many stocks are at the management goal of maximum sustainable yield and others are on the way. The recovery of some stocks like North Sea plaice is nothing short of breathtaking, with a biomass beyond anything seen within the historical record.

This is not to say that there aren’t some stocks that have yet to respond in the same way: West of Scotland and Irish Sea Cod are two examples where other factors may be impeding recovery. But the dominant downward trend is too well established, too widespread in geographical terms and across so many diverse fisheries, to be dismissed as a statistical blip.

One telling point in the scientists’s advice puts paid to a number of claims of celebrity chefs and journalists that their own heroic efforts have turned a catastrophic situation around. By the time that Johnny-Come- Latelys such as The End of the Line and Hugh’s Fish Fight turned their attention to fishing the trends discussed above were well established.

Causes

The precise reasons why fishing mortality has dropped so decisively in recent years are not straightforward to discern. Numerous management initiatives have come into play simultaneously and disentangling which worked from which didn’t simply isn’t feasible after the event.

Fleet reductions, tradable quota, increased selectivity, landing controls, effort control, an altered industry mindset, cod avoidance including real time closures have all been in the mix. Some have undoubtedly contributed, others have had perverse effects. ICES points to better control, for example in the Baltic Sea. Norway has been able to check the Russians in the Barents Sea. Other candidates include a move towards long term management plans, setting TACs in relation to maximum sustainable yield and better relations between the fishing industry and fisheries scientists. The answer lies surely in some combination of the above but the weight accorded to each is that science cannot provide.

ICES, however, does not give much credit to the theory that it is nature itself that has created this positive trend in fishing mortality. All species and ecosystems shifting in the same direction simultaneously simply sounds improbable, they conclude.

This article has borrowed freely from both ICES’ 2012 advice and a forthcoming article produced by the Danish Fishermen’s Association and the NNFO.



And here's an excellent resp[onse to the published information from Ray Hilborn

Myths

Fisheries science has been the unfortunate victim of a number of myths that have become widely accepted but are patently untrue. These myths include
we are fishing down food chains all large fish in the oceans are depleted by 90% most of the worlds fisheries are overfished all fish stocks will be collapsed by 2048 the “Ocean Health Index” assertion that France and Spain have the best managed fisheries in the world This page provides some comment on each of these
Fishing Down Food Webs

This myth was started by a paper in 1998 entitled “Fishing down marine food web” authored by Daniel Pauly and several others. The observation was that the mean trophic level of the worlds fish catch was declining as seen in the graph taken from Pauly’s paper. The authors then have gone on to argue that there is a common trend in fisheries, starting to fish at the top of the food chain, once those stocks are depleted, fishing fleets move down the food chain, and the net result is that soon nothing will be left in the ocean but jelly fish. The original paper, published in Science is one of the most commonly cited papers in fisheries and although this myth has been thoroughly debunked it continues to be widely believed, and Pauly and co-authors have an entire web site devoted to defending the idea.

Three papers have shown the errors in both the analysis and also the implications as asserted by the authors. The first paper was published by Tim Essington and co-authors in 2006. Their paper showed that the decline of mean trophic level in most marine ecosystems was not that all the high-trophic level fish were gone, but that in fact catch of high trophic level fish continued to rise. The decline was due to increased yields of lower trophic level fish. So while this paper didn’t challenge the assertion that mean trophic level in the catch was declining, it showed that the assertion that the high trophic level fish were declining in catch was wrong.

In 2010 Trevor Branch and colleagues published a paper in Nature showing that in fact, the mean trophic level in the world’s catch was rising, not falling, and that the decline Pauly had shown was due primarily to two species, the rebuilding of the Peruvian anchovetta stock (low trophic level), and the decline of catches of Atlantic cod. Worldwide the mean trophic level of the catch was rising, not falling. Branch also showed that if you look at the mean trophic level of fish in marine ecosystems, there was no overall decline in mean trophic levels. Branch pointed out that looking at any characteristic of catch, where it is total catch, or trophic level, is not necessarily a good measure of changes in the ecosystem itself since catches are rarely a random sample.

The final paper that nailed the coffin on “fishing down marine food webs” was also published in 2010 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Suresh Sethi, Trevor Branch and several others. Sethi began by asking a basic question — one that should have been asked by the proponents of fishing down a decade earlier. Are high trophic level species more valuable than low trophic level species? Remember the argument in support of fishing down is that fishing fleets begin with high trophic level species because they are more valuable.

What Sethi and co-authors found was that there is no relationship between trophic level and the price or value of fish. Some of the most expensive fish in a marketplace are prawns, crabs, scallops and lobsters, all relatively low trophic level species. Even among higher trophic level fishes there is no correlation between trophic level and value. The mechanism that underlies the theory of fishing down food webs simply isn’t true. Sethi found that fisheries do not begin with high trophic level species, but instead the development of fisheries in different regions of the world is largely independent of trophic level.

Fishing down food web — a Busted Myth.

Pauly, D., V. Christensen, J. Dlasgaard, R. Froese, and F. Torres Jr. 1998. Fishing down marine food webs. Science 279:860-863. Essington, T. E., A. H. Beaudreau, and J. Wiedenmann. 2006. Fishing through marine food webs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103:3171-3175. Branch, T. A., R. Watson, E. A. Fulton, S. Jennings, C. R. McGilliard, G. T. Pablico, D. Ricard, and S. R. Tracey. 2010. The trophic fingerprint of marine fisheries. Nature 468:431-435. Sethi, S. A., T. A. Branch, and R. Watson. 2010. Global fishery development patterns are driven by profit but not trophic level. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107:12163-12167. ______________________________________________________________________________ All large fish in the oceans are depleted by 90% This myth began with a 2003 paper in Nature entitled “Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities” in which the authors, Ransom Myers and Boris Worm, used a large body of Japanese tuna fleet longline records to show that the catch per hook declined very rapidly when the fishery began across a range of species, and that by 1980 catch per hook around the world was roughly only 10% of what it had been in the 1950s when the fishery began. This was taken as evidence of depletion of the oceans of tunas and relatives, and is the basis for repeated statements that 90% of the fish of the ocean are gone. 

 This paper caused an enormous controversy because this decline in longline CPUE had been known for a long time by scientists working on tunas and it was widely recognized NOT to reflect changes in abundance. Rebuttals were rapid and rather vehement, Carl Walters entitled his rebuttal “Folly and fantasy in the analysis of spatial catch rate data.” In 2006 John Sibert and colleagues published a paper in Science showing that abundance of large tunas and other species in the Pacific had not declined by anything like 90% by 2000, and had hardly declined at all by 1980. Further they showed that for these species in the Pacific the stocks were generally at or above the management target levels that produce maximum sustainable yield To some extent the last word on this issue was a paper published in 2010 in PNAS by Juan-Jorda and colleagues. They showed that globally tuna stocks by 2010 were at 40-50% of their unfished abundance, still generally at or above target levels, and that in 1980, when Myers and Worm had argued tuna had declined by 90%, in fact tuna stocks had been depleted only slightly and were at 80% of their unfished abundance. 

The myth that fish stocks have been depleted to only 10 or 20% of the original abundance based on the tuna and bilfish of the high seas is another BUSTED MYTH. 


Myers, R. A. and B. Worm. 2003. Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities. Nature 423:280-283. Walters, C. J. 2003. Folly and fantasy in the analysis of spatial catch rate data. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 60:1433-1436. Sibert, J., J. Hampton, P. Kleiber, and M. Maunder. 2006. Biomass, Size, and Trophic Status of Top Predators in the Pacific Ocean. Science 314:1773-1776. Juan-Jorda, M. S., I. Mosqueira, A. B. Cooper, J. Freire, and N. K. Dulvy. 2011. Global population trajectories of tunas and their relatives. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108:20650-20655.

French fishermen in double suicide from the trawler Neway

Tragedy trawler: The Neway seen here towing the Cap3000 into Newlyn three years ago.

Below is a translation from the French newspaper Le Télégramme which covered the sad news that the two young fishermen lost overboard from the Neway last week in fact committed suicide.

Translation:

A double suicide. This is the incredible conclusion reached the floor of Saint-Brieuc to explain the disturbing disappearance of two young sailors Neway, off the Scilly Islands on Saturday.

"This is a serious matter because two people died. And exceptional case in the light of the conclusions we reach today: there is a double suicide ! ". It is with these words that Gerard Zaug began yesterday afternoon press conference intended to clarify particularly unclear circumstances surrounding the disappearance of two young sailors from Neway last Saturday. It was around 19 pm when Anthony Deveaux 25, and Alexander Sebert, 27, had gone overboard, while the deep-sea trawler based in Saint-Quay-Portrieux property of Christophe Doledec was a few nautical miles from the Scilly Islands, west of Cornwall England.

To support his argument, the prosecutor was first supported on the testimony of three crew members, questioned at length by the coastguard once landed at Roscoff (29) on Monday afternoon. Men who came back, in detail, on that tragic evening. At the time, the skipper was on the bridge. The other two sailors, one was at the helm and the other mending a net. According to them, their two friends were first isolated for about twenty minutes, before returning to the bridge at the request of the captain, who felt that there was still work to be finished. 

This is Anthony Deveaux who would voluntarily threw the first water. Imitated, "two up three minutes later," by his friend Alexander Sebert. The one port, the other to starboard. Avoiding warps. Both boots on and waxed on the back. "There is therefore no two accidental falls, or a man who jumped to save his friend fell into the water, assured the prosecutor. It is a voluntary act. They swam away from the boat despite the buoy was thrown into the sea " Both separated If the two sailors , who were very close, have left no letter explaining their actions, their tragic end does not seem be unduly surprised their entourage. The melancholy, "the two men were in somewhat similar situations: separated from their concubines and their children," said Gerard Zaug. Which also referred to a judicial proceeding against one of the missing. And the fact that Anthony Deveaux had expressed suicidal thoughts. 

To shed more light on the state of mind in which it was Saturday morning, the prosecutor revealed that he had told one of the crew members that he would be able to jump in the water for 400 € . To which he replied that it was just enough to pay for the shower ... "Everything has been tried" "It's good they were at sea. And it is perhaps not insignificant if it happened just before their return to Earth, scheduled for tomorrow ... Everything was done to save them, "said Gerard Zaug. For that crew, "in which reigned a great atmosphere," has absolutely nothing to apologize for. 

"Due to technical problems, the boss could not contact the Cross Corsen but we know that there have been several attempts."As for the hypothesis of an alcohol and / or drugs, which may explain a passage to the act," no material can establish, "said the prosecutor, closing the door immediately raised the question.

Full story here.

Sunshine forecast for Porthleven Food Fest!

The festival theme for 2013 is ‘Sourced from the Sea’. 

We will be celebrating the role the sea plays in Porthleven’s heritage and present day. Porthleven’s fishermen will be bringing in their usual fresh catch of lobster and crab and our Chefs will get to the task of creating fabulous dishes with the catch. 

A few things have been improved for the 2013 festival. Our Young Festival has moved closer to the main marquee this year with the usual array of activities and fun. We have an additional small stage near the Salt Cellar for acoustic performances and there will be the usual eclectic mix of performances on our other stages.

2013 Programme 

Get some of these new fish fighting tallies for your boat and support our fishing communities!

New fish tickets now printed and all ready.....

10,000 of them

Lets get this show on the road and promote our great fish & seafood!