West of the Scillies

There's an interesting collection of French trawlers and Danish mid-water (pelagic) boats working west side of the Scilles at the momet.

Quality Cornish hake goes down a storm in the Royal Boprough

rex goldsmith ‏ @rexgoldsmith

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@ThroughTheGaps the good people of Chelsea are loving their hake. Especially caught from that fantastic boat @AjaxAH32. God bless her

Now this is just the sort of message we love to see being fed back from our customers up in the smoke - nice one Rex! Been a while since I had my bonnet trimmed in Vidal Sassoons round the corner!

The Apprentice goes fishing - Monty Halls in Cadgwith - BBC2 last night at 8pm, tonight at midnight in HD!!

Apprentice fisherman Monty Halls on the beach at Cadgwith with top lobster pot man Nigel Legge.

Showing for the next five weeks every Wednesday night at 8pm, marine biologiost Monty Hall finds out just what it takes to actually make a living from the sea in Cornish waters. In episode one, an Introduction to the Skippers from Cadgwith Cove who Monty Halls is about to work alongside, local Skipper Jonathan Tonkin - 'Tonks' - gives his first impressions of Monty. This is first in a series of six episodes; in later shows Monty will have his understanding of ethical fishing vs making a living in the context of modern fishing methods put to the test when he sails in some of the bigger boats from Newlyn.


Monty Halls is a writer, explorer, television presenter and public speaker. A former Royal Marines officer who worked for Nelson Mandela on the peace process in South Africa, he left the services in 1996 to pursue a career in leading expeditions. Having achieved a First Class Honors degree in marine biology, over the next decade he circumnavigated the globe four times on various projects, leading multi-national teams in some of the most demanding environments on earth. Notable expeditions included an anti poaching project in the high montane grasslands of the Nyika Plateau in northern Malawi, the discovery of a sunken city off the coast of Tamil Nadu in India, and a (successful) attempt to find and photograph a rare crocodile species in the mountain pools of the Raspaculo Basin in Central America. In 2002 he was awarded the Bish Medal by the Scientific Exploration Society for his services to exploration.

Hake back on the menu!

Marks seen on the echosounder - part 1

Of all the instruments available to the skipper in the wheelhouse, the electronic echo-sounder still plays a major role in the detection of fish and reading of the seabed or 'botttom'. Early models, using sound waves beamed straight down from the hull of the boat, used a roll of paper that continually moved across to display the results received by the transducer from the bottom. Today's meters display in colour on a screen - pale blue being the weakest signal return all the way through to blood red indicating something much more solid.  A soft bottom like mud shows up as a thin red line with a fat orange/yellow section, a harder bottom loses the yellow and becomes a thick red as the hardness increases.


In this photo taken aboard the Ajax as she steamed for Newlyn two large marks of fish - thought to be herring - can be seen. The large white number indicates the depth of the water in fathoms - for those not familiar, a fathom is six feet or 1.82 metres. That means that the shoal of fish is around 15 times a fathom high - around 90 feet - that's a lot of fish! The screen is split with the lower half showing an expanded section from the bottom up to 3 fathoms - a typical working configuration for netters and trawlers wanting to interpret the water under the boat.

Click on the image to see how the echosounder 'meters' the bottom.