Every now and then when the weather pushes in strong winds and a big ground sea from the west it pays to have a look in the Bay for big white fish...
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| Just a few of the 500kg of spurdogs caught and dumped today by the Govenek of Ladram |
but by the end of play today, the Govenek of Ladram had amassed around a half a ton of spurdogs - not the best fish to have mixed in with the rest of your haul when there is a moratorium on landing these fish!
Catches of spurdogs have been steadily rising right around the English coastline in recent years and fishermen are quite rightly wondering when some sort of sensible landing policy will be agreed before the tonnage being dumped becomes untenable.
What grieves the boats most is the lack of serious data on the spread of these fish - as there is a complete ban on landing even a single fish there are no landing records to compute.
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| Gary, from Cefas collecting landing data on Newlyn market - one time port record holder Boy Gary was named after him. |
Over the years Nelwyn has seen some huge landings of dogs - at one time the port record which stood at £37,500 was held by the 36ft tosher Boy Gary from fishing on spurdogs...
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| For a while the traditional aluminium kits were replaced with plastic ones for the very largest sizes of white fish like dogs, cod, conger, pollack, coley, ling and ray which were deemed not to require more gentle handling. |
many of the fish landed were left in 10st piles on the quay and auctioned off as they were.