Friday's top quality fish day!

Staff team from the award winning Harbour Lights fish and chip shop in Falmouth have come to Newlyn to see at first hand where their top quality locally sourced fish come from - and its good to see these guts have hake on their menu...

R is for Red, as in gills that is...

silver is skin, bass skin...

B is for Bass from the Butts, skippered by King Cod...

A is for Auction it begins at six...

C is for Cuttlefish, black gold to some...

bidding is brisk on the last market for the week with mainly top quality inshore fish and a few short trips from the beam trawlers that landed...

almost done and dusted, the view down the grading machine...

the scaffolding has gone up on skipper Corin's new command...

there's both sides of gear to do on the Karen...

and the old sidewinder, Anthony is being broken up and taken away in section...

D is for Dawn that breaks over the Lizard.

Is this a flare just gone up in Mount's Bay?

Hot off the press! - Catch Quota Trials 2012 - Interim Report (November 2012)

 

This interim report provides a summary of the progress of the 2012 trials, to the end of September, of catch quota management using remote monitoring and CCTV.

A total of 22 English-administered vessels are fitted with remote monitoring equipment and CCTV and are engaged in trials for a range of stocks as well as non-catch quota-related trials. The results, to date, are demonstrating that discards have been virtually eliminated for the species under trial.

So reads the first few lines of the MMOs 2012 interim report on video surveillance, sorry, monitoring of fishing vessels in the North Sea and South Western Approaches. You do have to wonder at the lengths to which fishermen have to go in order to prove they are making a legal living these days. Trying to turn things round and look at this latest ruse to monitor fishing effort in a more positive light - the video recordings may also be useful in demonstrating just how MUCH fish of so called endangered species are being caught in abundance at times!

 

Grimsby heyday of the 'three-day millionaire'

It was easy to spot a so-called "three-day millionaire" in Grimsby in the 1950s.

The moneyed men were from the town's trawling fleets and made their living working "at the hardest job in the world".

After about three weeks toiling in the fishing grounds, they would return for just three days on land to spend their hard-earned cash before going back to sea.

'Look at my money'

Their lives and other aspects of the booming Grimsby fishing industry of the 1950s are being marked in an exhibition called Fish, Ships and Rock 'n' Roll.

Local history enthusiast Alf Ludlam, 71, said: "The men would stand out in what almost amounted to a uniform.

"They would wear pale grey or blue suits with lots of pleats in the back of the jackets and baggy trousers."

And the men wore open-necked shirts as "however cold it was in town, it was never as cold as on a trawler off Iceland," he addedMr Ludlam, a museum volunteer with Grimsby Council, said the suits were a fashion statement but also a way of saying "look at my money" because the trawlermen could afford to buy a extravagant quantity of cloth.

Mr Ludlam remembers watching the men roaming his home town during the 1950s, a time when "thanks to fishing Grimsby was making more money than ever".

At its peak in that decade, Mr Ludlam said Grimsby was "the largest fishing port in the world".

The vibrancy of the fishing trade had a spin-off for the rest of the town until the mid-1970s. It was a great period to grow up in Grimsby, Mr Ludlam said, because "everything was in the melting pot".

"Fishing was Grimsby's raison d'etre - no fishing, no Grimsby, " he added.

Icelandic confrontations

The heyday for the trade lasted about 20 years but the reliance on fishing proved to be a problem for the town as the trawler fleet contracted during, and after, the two decades of the Cod Wars.

Iceland started extending its territorial limit around the island to exclude foreign vessels from the water it claimed as its own.

The limit was extended on three occasions between 1958 and 1976, each time forcing British fishing vessels further offshore.

The limit was finally extended 200 miles off Iceland.

This led to confrontations at sea between the Icelandic coastguard and trawlers from Grimsby and Hull.

Several ships were even rammed as trawlers continued to try to fish within the new limit.

'Daggers drawn'

The neighbouring fishing ports of Grimsby and Hull vied with each other in the size and skill of their trawler fleet, and the quality and quantity of fish landed.

Mr Ludlam said the ports had "always been at daggers drawn" and their fishing fleets were a source of civic pride.

He said the collapse of the trawler industry in Grimsby mirrored the similar economic and social struggle former mining towns experienced after the pits closed.

The two industries of fishing and mining were also linked by the level of danger encountered.

Mr Ludlam said: "Fishing was the most dangerous - when you set sail you didn't know if you were going to come back."

The free exhibition Fish, Ships and Rock 'n' Roll is open until Sunday January 13 at the Fishing Heritage Centre in Grimsby

Nearly one-in-10 products at major markets mislabeled; Europe’s largest department store pulls fish after ICIJ investigation

Consumers in Spain trust the mild-flavored white flesh of hake, the most popular fish in a country that eats more seafood than almost any other in Europe. Hake is considered safe for pregnant women, and kids crunch into the cod-like fillets as fishsticks.

“There’s trust because of the cultural bond,” said Cristina San Martín, head of quality and food safety at Fedepesca, a trade group representing Spanish fish retailers. “You see it from the time you’re a kid, and it also has a good price.”
What Spaniards probably don’t know is that the fish they take home for dinner might not be hake at all.


Video: The hake hoax Hake is Spain's most popular fish, but consumers aren't always getting what they think they are buying. A scientific study commissioned by the International Center for Investigative Journalists found that almost one in 10 fish purchased at markets in Spain were mislabeled. This video follows reporters buying the fish and explains why mislabeling can mask bigger problems in the oceans.

The Spanish public is being cheated by a seemingly pervasive and dangerous form of commercial fraud: Different species — including cheaper fish such as catfish from Vietnam and grenadier from the Pacific Ocean — are sold as hake in markets across Madrid. A DNA study commissioned by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found in July that nearly one in 10 fish were mislabeled. A study completed last year by the same scientists found mislabeling in nearly 40 percent of samples.

“Some of the revealed cases are really ‘cheeky’ and shockingly blunt attempts to fool consumers,” said the European Commission’s top fisheries DNA expert Jann Th. Martinsohn, who reviewed ICIJ’s methodology and findings. “And worse, they are not unique.”

Hake is big business in Spain, where sales exceed €1 billion a year. Mislabeling could bump the bottom line of companies that pass off cheap fish as higher-quality fillets, and may even mask illegal fishing, marine biologists and economists say. The European Union has strict regulations requiring that a paper trail follow fish from ship to shop. But the law doesn’t require that inspectors implement DNA testing to verify accurate labeling.

“The majority [of mislabeling] is commercial fraud,” said Ricardo Pérez, DNA expert and investigator of the Spanish National Research Council. “In recent years there’s been an increase of it, I think because companies know they’re not being watched.”

Mislabeling seafood is a global phenomenon. The environmental group Oceana reported in May that studies in different countries around the world found between 25 to 70 percent of the fish being mislabeled. In the United States, tilapia was sold as red snapper. In South Africa, mackerel was sold as barracuda. In New Zealand, protected hammerhead shark was sold as lemon shark.

Europe’s top department store El Corte Inglés pulled a batch of more than a ton of mislabeled fish from its shelves when told of ICIJ’s findings. The majority of markets that carried mislabeled fish attributed the problem to human error. And every one of the eight shops where ICIJ found mislabeled samples said it was a one-time occurrence. Authorities in Spain seemed to agree. They said they didn’t think the results of ICIJ’s study were significant enough to show a trend, or present a major threat to the public.

Almost half Spain’s consumers buy their food in or near Madrid. Yet in 2010, regional and city authorities taxed with controlling consumer goods used scientific testing to identify fish species of 59 samples — about a third the number included in the ICIJ study. One thing appears clear: Consumers are largely ignored in the equation.

“What they [authorities] answer, is, ‘will somebody die? No. Well, then it’s only money,’” said Gemma Trigueros, nutritional coordinator at the Spanish Consumers and Users Association (OCU).

What’s on your plate?

Hake is found across the globe — from Argentina and Namibia, to Ireland and New Zealand — and there are at least 12 distinct species of hake in all. Some, like southern African hakes, are cheap. Others, like European hakes, return a higher profit.

Spain imports more than 60 percent of the hake coming to the EU. So scientists at the University of Oviedo in Spain partnered with a Greek university and last December published findings of a multi-year study. Their results showed that more than one in three hake products sold in Spain and Greece were not what they appeared. Researchers identified a trend: Cheap species were sold as higher-priced European or American hake, leading scientists to deduce that companies were committing fraud.

Eva García Vázquez, the primary author, did not publish company names in her report and declined to share those with ICIJ, although she said she would have given the information to the government, had officials asked.
So ICIJ undertook a sampling in Madrid to find out if the mislabeling continued and what companies were involved. In June, reporters collected 150 hake samples from major supermarkets, fishmongers and bulk suppliers. ICIJ commissioned the experts at the University of Oviedo to conduct a blind DNA analysis of those products.

DNA testing is better known for its use in forensic analysis, publicized on TV programs like CSI. Yet the tests are today fairly simple, cheap and quick. And they have a wide range of uses. Thanks to an enzyme-based technique developed in the 1980s, scientists can obtain the DNA sequence from a fish and, by matching it to an online database, identify the species in just one day.
ICIJ’s analysis showed that 8.6 percent of samples were mislabeled. The researchers concluded that the actual level of mislabeling is likely much higher than what ICIJ’s snapshot study has documented.

'Surely Deliberate'

The most worrisome findings involved entirely different families of fish being sold as hake. Long-bodied Patagonian grenadier from the southern ocean, bulbous-eyed Pacific grenadier found off the coast off of California, and striped catfish pulled from rivers in Vietnam look nothing alike when they’re swimming. Yet as a frozen fillet, most shoppers just see white fish.

But the fish dealers can tell.

“They don’t even look alike,” said Gonzalo González, a fishmonger whose family has been selling fish since the 1920s and is president of Fedepesca. “Some are whiter than others — like detergent commercials say.” This helped experts at the University of Oviedo conclude that swapping species was “surely deliberate.”

When alerted to the ICIJ findings, El Corte Inglés, Europe’s largest department store, took immediate action to independently verify the problem. The high-end market said it conducted its own DNA analysis of seven batches of the mislabeled product and found that the samples from one shipment of 1.4 metric tons were also mislabeled. 
 
“We’ve withdrawn that entire batch from our shops,” said a spokesperson for the store. “We’re in conversations with the provider to take drastic measures.” She declined to share the provider’s identity for “confidentiality reasons,” and said El Corte Inglés has started to carry out genetic testing of fish as part of its routine quality controls.

ICIJ also encountered problems with products sold in top supermarket Alcampo from Spain’s leading fish exporter, Freiremar. Two products of its brand Nakar were mislabeled — one was a different species of hake, the other was a Pacific Ocean grenadier. Freiremar said it doesn’t regularly conduct genetic analysis “unless there’s a well-founded suspicion.” Freiremar asked the supermarket to withdraw the products identified by ICIJ’s study as Pacific grenadier “as a precautionary approach.”

All the experts who weighed in on the study said the most egregious finding was the case of Vietnamese striped catfish sold as hake by a local fishmonger, Pescados El Bierzo. This river species is criticized for higher contamination levels and lower nutritional value than other fish.

The shop is housed in a market serving immigrants in Madrid’s city center. Its manager Vicente — who declined to give his last name — said ICIJ caught a one-time error, not a widespread practice. He said various types of bulk frozen fillets are separated only by plastic sheet. The mislabeling likely occurred by a “fillet of catfish jumping into the hake area.”

Health at stake

Researchers at the University of Oviedo warned that cases where a different fish than expected is sold could cause “severe health problems to unaware consumers.”

Allergist Dr. Beatriz Rodríguez of Madrid’s Getafe University Hospital said that while normally people are allergic to fish generally, it’s increasingly common to develop sensitivity to one particular species group — like catfish. Kids are the most vulnerable.

“If I tell the mother: avoid catfish and then she buys hake thinking she’s safe, the child could have a severe allergic reaction,” she said, causing hives, diarrhea or even problems breathing. In Hong Kong, more than 600 people became violently ill in 2007 after eating what they thought was “Atlantic cod” — and turned out to be poisonous oilfish, named for the indigestible wax esters in its flesh.

Scientists warn of other health risks with fish mislabeling: pollutants, toxins and other harmful substances like mercury specific to geographic regions or species. Health officials in the EU and Spain said there are currently no health alerts caused by fish mislabeling.

National fish sells

Sergio Sánchez manages Pescados y Congelados Conchi, a bulk foreign fish shop where both of ICIJ’s hake purchases were mislabeled. He said when he buys fish for his shop, he cares about the best-by date and appearance. He said some consumers turn up their noses when told the truth about the origin of fish.
“National species sell. You tell people that hake is from Chile and they don’t want it,” Sánchez said. “You tell them shrimp is from China — and not from Huelva [in southern Spain] — and same thing.”

Supermarket chains Alcampo, Hipercor, Eroski and Carrefour each blamed a one-time error by an employee. All the markets said they adhere to strict quality controls. Carrefour said it “last year … rejected 188,909 kg (for not being correctly labeled or because they did not meet minimum size requirements).”
In the cases where more expensive European hake was billed as cheaper hake species, Alcampo said the consumer wins. “We were giving the client a product of higher quality than what the label said,” the company wrote in an email response.

Stefano Mariani of the University College in Dublin, thinks cases like this may point to another problem: overfishing. When a boat reaches its quota, it must stop targeting that type of fish. But any additional catch could be laundered into the legal market as a different fillet, Mariani reported in a study published earlier this year.

“Would you accept getting pig meat when you buy beef? Absolutely not,” he said. In a tightly controlled market like the EU he finds the problem alarming.
European hakes are subject to strict catch limits under recovery plans, a result of decades of overfishing. Meanwhile fishmongers have been complaining about the low prices they’re getting for the fish, which leads some vendors to conclude that fishermen aren’t adhering to the quotas. The Ministry of Environment, Agriculture and Fisheries denied Spanish vessels are exceeding hake quotas .

Law and disorder

EU law requires a label follow the fish from net or farm to the final vendor.
The Health and Fisheries ministries are required to verify that imports are really what they appear. The latter is also taxed with inspecting fish landed at Spanish ports. The Fisheries ministry did not provide the number of inspectors, although it said more than 200 people were involved in their entire control operations.
Neither ministry would comment on ICIJ’s findings, saying they could not “draw general conclusions.” They did not respond to questions regarding the earlier multi-year study by the University of Oviedo.

No EU law requires member countries to conduct DNA testing to find out if labels and products match. And most — including Spain — largely do not employ such testing.

Several authorities share control of tracking fish, safety and labeling in Spain. The fractured oversight allows individual authorities to shrug off blame. Regional governments oversee supermarkets, restaurants and factories. The Madrid regional and city governments administer products for a region comprised of more than 7 million people and the world’s second-largest fish market.

Yet officials there scientifically tested just 59 fish to verify the species in 2010. José Manuel Torrecilla, manager of the health authority in the city of Madrid, acknowledged they do very few tests on fish identification, but said the city plans to increase the number in coming years.

“It’s more important what causes a health risk to consumers: contaminants in fish and its freshness,” he said, pointing out that the city labs conducted about 500 tests for freshness and contaminants in 2010.

Scientist Ricardo Pérez has been conducting DNA analysis of fish for more than two decades. He said he feels frustrated because regional governments just aren’t interested in what he offers. “There’s no money for that,” they tell him.
“You develop interesting tools for governments to improve control, and it’s almost impossible to get them to do something,” he said.

The EU Commission research center recently published a study showing how scientific techniques such as DNA testing are vital to fight illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. Co-author Jann Th. Martinsohn told ICIJ the cost of scientific testing is no longer prohibitive — it can be as low as €35 per sample if you test in bulk.

Martinsohn has spoken to officials across the EU, pushing governments to implement the kind of testing that private industry has been doing for years. Spanish officials told him the Fisheries ministry only does sporadic DNA testing, while the industry group Anfaco has its own private laboratory.

Carlos Ruiz, technical and policy coordinator of Anfaco, told ICIJ its lab conducts 47,000 tests a year — about 1,000 of them being DNA analysis of the species. But they don’t share results with the government unless it’s a commissioned job paid for by officials. And those are rare.

“This is a private lab,” Ruiz said. “We’re not watchdogs of the market.”
Martinsohn lists Denmark as one of the most advanced countries in the EU on the use of DNA analysis in fisheries enforcement. The Danish Fisheries Inspectorate collaborates with the public university to conduct the testing. Inspectors there carry small toolboxes to obtain tissue.

Pérez, the Spanish researcher so frustrated with government’s disinterest, is taking his research a step further. He’s developing a test kit akin to a pregnancy test so inspectors can verify the species within minutes. But he said if governments don’t take the lead, he encourages consumers to speak up.
“I hope that if there are complaints, agencies will start answering them,” he said. “If companies know they’re not being monitored, what they’re going to do is try to make more money.”

Article courtesy of the Public Integrity web site:

Cefas Endeavour JNCC cSAC and SMPA Survey - North Sea

Below is an extract from the current Cefas Endeavour survey in the North Sea. The current set of posts have proved very informative and give an excellent insight into the daily (24 hour that is) work carried out on board. The post below, from last Sunday is of particular interest to prawn fishermen. When there was a small but active Newlyn prawn fleet the boats did not fish during darkness as the langoustine were reportedly safely tucked up in their mud borrows - not so it seems in the North Sea!

The current survey is of particular interest to fishermen as the boat is gathering data about a number of MPAs due to be implemented soon. Visit the JNCC site for more information about the designated offshore SACs here.

"Welcome to the first of our blogs from the Cefas Endeavour where we are collaborating with the JNCC to undertake survey work at a number of candidate Special Areas of Conservation (cSAC) and proposed areas for national nature conservation Marine Protected Areas (MPA) in the Fladen Grounds."

Once again, the weather has improved (for now...) and we have managed to complete our video survey of the 'Scanner cSAC'.  The seafloor habitats in and around the site largely comprise muddy sediments which are populated by a diverse range of animals which live on the seabed (commonly known as epifauna) and also those which burrow within the mud.  A species that we frequently sighted during the video survey was the Norway Lobster (Nephrops norvegicus) - also known as 'Scampi' or the 'Dublin Bay Prawn' (see below).

 

A number of other creatures were commonly sighted during the video survey and these included burrowing anemones, sea pens and the 'sand star' Astropecten irregularis (see below).

 

Having completed the remainder of the video and grab stations the wind has picked up once again (as predicted) so we have decided to use this poor weather window to transit down to the next survey area which is the 'Turbot Bank nature conservation MPA proposal'.

 

Hopefully, the wind and waves will subside during our journey south so that we can begin our survey on arrival at the Turbot Bank...

Click here to view the page on the Cefas web site and blog.

Looting the seas - Blue Charity involvement

Yesterdays post on Looting the Seas is another example of the work by Blue Charities in funding resources that impact directly on the public's perception of fisheremn as the bad guys - looting is an evocative word, more often associated with the terrible atrocities carried out around the world in the name of desperate causes - often used in conjunction with rape and pillage and designed to arouse people's ire and emotions.

 

 

Looting the seas was financed by PEW, Oak, Adessium and David & Lucile Packard foundations

ICIJ is in fact the Centre for Public Integrity

Funder	year	beneficiary	US$	Title	weblink	Purpose of the grant
The PEW Charitable trusts	2009	Centre for Public Integrity (+ ICIJ)	100 000	Looting the Seas : phase 1 Bluefin Tuna	http://www.pewtrusts.org/program_investments_grant_details.aspx?id=85899358224	To investigate the entire "chain of custody" of companies illegally depleting blue fin tuna populations to produce in-depth, global reports.
Oak foundation	2010	Centre for Public Integrity (+ ICIJ)	249 000	Looting the Seas	http://www.oakfnd.org/node/3133	To investigate and expose some of the worst excesses of fishing fleets around the world. The main objectives are to: 1) investigate the political, regulatory and legal climate in Spain; 2) launch a major investigative series by November 2011 on the role of the Spanish fishing fleet, with multiple stories and multimedia; and 3) disseminate the investigation to key stakeholders, including policymakers, regulators, NGOs and the broadest possible public audience.
Adessium foundation (NL)	2010	Centre for Public Integrity (+ ICIJ)	255 000	looting the seas ?	F990 Center of public integrity
The David & Lucile Packard foundation	2011	Centre for Public Integrity (+ ICIJ)	250 000	Looting the Seas	http://www.packard.org/grants/grants-database/center-for-public-integrity/	For an investigative report on black market fisheries along the Pacific Rim