It's an octoplus kind of morning in Newlyn!

Plenty of action alongside the fish market this morning...

with three big pot boats landing trips of octopi...

inside Bay 1 of the market there were plenty of inshore fish from the trawlers that made the most of the fine weather over the weekend...

though a dozen or so boxes of hake was not quite what the netter Stelissa had in mind for a trip...

whereas a good few boxes of plaice and ray made a good trip for the Martha Mae...

and these gurnards will make for a dazzling display on someone's wet fish counter later today...

blue sharks are more of a summer favourite...

though much more lucrative are these craws picked up by...

Spanish Eyes doing a proper bit of inshore fishing...

the boys on the deck of the Stelissa will have been less than impressed with this amount of dogs in their nets - not what the doctor ordered - once upon a time this would have been a good trip but after years of a total ban on landing dogfish the markets ashore dried up so that now the fish make very little money as there are no merchants geared up to take them in bulk any more...

fishing always seems to provide a bumper harvest and at the moment it is the turn of Mediterranean octopus...

to hit the headlines...

just some of the catch from one of the boats is already in the marke...

el congero...

one reason the sardine boats are having a hard time catching fish is the presence of marauding bluefin and dolphins chasing the shoals hard...

some handliners have been busy on the bass again...

and the Inter-Nos did make good a landing of sardines despite the presence of apex predators...

a few canny men went after squid with the jigs, Gary on the Bethshan having really got in amongst them...

there's a box with a tally on it in there somewhere...

one tide's worth for young Andrew...

inshore red mullet always look good enough to eat straight out of the water...

and the size of these mackerel is encouraging...

more bass to go away...

however, the handliners cannot compete with net boats when it comes to bass...

here is the boat in question under construction for a Mevagissey skipper...

meanwhile the boys on the Isabellai are hard at it landing their latest haul of octopi...

and the eight-leggers are alive and crawling!

Scillonian III completes her final trip to the Scillys!

As the mooring ropes are made fast...

thousands turned out to see the Scillonian III tie up in Penzance harbour for the last time...

there was a reception committee afloat...

including Penlee lifeboat...

and others with long links to the ferry...

like Jeremy on the Danmark...

so under a dramatic evening sky sky...

Joe Whetton, ship's master for her final voyage turns off her navigation lights now that she is moored alongside the quay.

Here, the Scillonian steams past the Newlyn gill netter Ajax in 2012 as they round the Runnelstone buoy off Gwennap Head.

Downs and downs in Newlyn

After some TLC below the waterline, it's time to come down from slip...

and escape the slip's cradle...

before the sardine boat Mayflower heads off across the Bay only to find there's no GPS...

so it's back in through the gaps...

to find a berth...

and get on the phone to summons some tehcnical expertise to sort the problem...

things are not so good fr the sardine fleet at the moment with most of the boats drawing a blank on more nights than not as is evident from the sorties they have made in search of suitable marks of fish - that aren't being cased hard by bluefin and dolphins...

over in Penzance Dry Dock where it is still a block and tackle used to open the dock gates...

some serious bits of kit are in the process of being installed...

meanwhile, the wet dock is hosting a guard ship or two...

along with the old Scilly supply ship, Gry Maritha...

down comes the job after a successful lift in...

looks like the scaffolding bug has spread to the new Scilly supply ship, Menawethan...

over in Newlyn Thursday morning's auction has just got underway at 6am and a couple of keen Falmouth Uni students are getting the low down from head auctioneer Ian...

and there is plenty of fish for the guys to see...

with decent tris of fish from the port's big trawler, Crystal Sea...

quality tubs from the netter Ygraine...

monk livers and cheeks from the beam trawler Cornishman...

more hake from the Ocean Pride...

and a good mix is just what the students need for their research, her grabbing a reference pic of some ceacking gilt-head bream...

the Ygraine pitched in with a huge shot of bass only to find the price on the floor, more than 50% less than what they might have expected for this tome of year at the very least, just one of the challenges skippers have to deal with...

as usual, the big beam trawlers both anded good shots of monk which seem to hold their price better than top drawer fish like bass...

a little trick used by the fishroom man is to pair up Dover soles belly-to-belly which helps keep the  belly of this delicately flavoured fish from being damaged and discoloured by ice......

not a problem with tails...

even less so with head-on monk!..

it's a dull sart to the day with the ambient temperature having dropped significantly from the weekend when many people were still walking along the promenade in T-shirts!