How fresh is your fish? -try this free iPhone app.

Screen shots of the app in action - for iPhone owners.

An iPhone app from Nofima will assist fishmongers to evaluate how fresh a batch of fish is. The app was launched Wednesday at the European Seafood Exposition in Brussels.

The app is free and is aimed at fishmongers and others wanting to evaluate the shelf life of whole gutted fresh fish.

The freshness of the fish may be evaluated via a few steps, including odour, texture and the appearance of the eyes, skin and gills. The final result appears immediately.

Sun pz sun

Flags fly from Penzance's oldest pub.......

Untitled, the latest restaurant to open in Penzance.....

 waiting for orders, the Scillonian on her day off........

 looks like the World Gig Championships did some severe damage to beer stocks on the Scillys......

 local marine artist, Nick Praed lives and works aboard his boat, the Arkincastle, in Penzance wet dock......

 and his near neighbour has the summer sorted on deck.......

 temporary dock resident, the Elizabeth N has plenty of work to do topsides......

 John Cabot's replica, Matthew,waiting for a weather window before she heads back to her Falmouth base.....

 at Battery Rocks a flock of gulls enjoy riding the hefty offshore breeze.......

 on the Jubilee pool wall, a graffiti artist with a keen interest in gardening has been at work again.......

 open for summer trade, the Poolside Indulgence Cafe........

 still adrift, the Battery Rocks' swimmers' buoy........

 Stanhope Forbes' depiction of the Great Fire of London at the Newlyn School Gallery in Chapel Street.......

while up the road signs that Penzance could be the new Roc, a local, 'up-market' charity shop has an original art work by Damien Hirst for sale in the window. 

No sun, no fish, that easterly wind does its damndest.

About to land on a modern day punt.....

but it's slim pickings for the handline boys this morning......

is it coming yet?........

as the boys on the Cornishman wait for the ice to appear down the chute.

Scillonian sails to the Scillys and back.

Screen shot from VesselTracker app on an iPhone.

The new VesselTracker mobile app allows users to track vessels off the Cornish coast (or any where in the world for that matter) - here the Scillonian can be seen (in real time) making her way back to Penzance for the night. You nver know this app could help you win the nightly bet in the Yacht Inn guesssing when she will appear of Penlee point!

Intuition chasing crabs ashore.

The AIS picked up the Intuition seemingly making her way up Paul Hill in Newlyn tonight!

Rocking Rose of Sharon returns.

A familiar name on a lifebuoy has appeared in the harbour...

with her old fishing number FR23 still clearly visible atop the wheelhouse...

the old St Ives trawler now sports a number of deck lights indicating her new role as a live aboard...

registered in Dartmouth...

sporting the initials ES...

gone are the days when her stern was home to a net drum...

as can be seen in this shot when she was one of  'the clan', a fleet of around ten trawlers that worked from Newlyn (two of the boats in this picture were lost at sea)...

like every trawler, on the odd occasion she was 'mopped up' with her own trawl ...

unlike this shot where she shows another St Ives registered trawler, the Keriolet, her net drum.

The Rose of Sharon is, in some ways, an historic boat. She was built in 1969 for the Stevens family (Crystal Sea II). Although St Ives owned, she, like all the big St Ives boats, worked from Newlyn. As a long liner, on average the boats of this size worked around 26 baskets of lines fishing mainly for ling, skate and pollack. In Summer, the boats could be found fishing over 100 miles West of the Scillys. In her later years the boat was skippered by youngest son Peter Stevens and trawled for white fish. She was also one of a small fleet of boats that prosecuted the prawn fishery in the eighties.

Newlyn, despite being for many years the largest port in England, has never witnessed a new build programme on the scale of that found elsewhere, especially when compared to Breton ports - where many of the boats fish exactly the same grounds as the local fleet. What makes the boat significant in the history of Newlyn is that she was, until the Girl Pat III, the only boat built new to sail from Newlyn since 1969 that required a ticketed skipper (>18m) – to this day. Recent new builds just under the 18m, Sowenna, Intuition and Silver Dawn all represent considerable investment for the local fleet.


Not too sure what father Stevens would make of her current role as a stage for rock music in her home port of Dartmouth!

New MSC web site - the Good Fish Guide.

There’s No Excuse To Make The Wrong Fish Choice, As Simplified Sustainability Guide Is Launched.

The Marine Conservation Society (MCS) has today launched its most comprehensive sustainable seafood advice to date, giving consumers, industry, chefs and retailers the best chance they’ve ever had to make the right decision when it comes to buying seafood.


MCS says that by making the right choices now, and by varying the types of fish to go with chips or in chowder, consumers can allow depleted fish stocks to recover and ensure future generations have the opportunity to enjoy a fish supper.


A new online consumer guide to sustainable seafood, the Good Fish Guide, at www.goodfishguide.org.uk, gives straightforward advice and recipe ideas to help make buying choices simple and more varied. This site links with the more comprehensive Fishonline website, www.fishonline.org which is already widely used by the public, chefs and industry as a one-stop reference point when sourcing sustainable fish. Fishonline was the tool of choice for celebrity chefs during Channel 4’s Fish Fight series earlier this year, and is updated with easier search functions for fish buyers and consumers wanting to buy sustainably.


The MCS Pocket Good Fish Guide has also been updated, and now includes a credit card-sized guide to purchasing fish, with top buying tips and questions to ask at the fish counter when labelling isn’t sufficiently informative.


MCS Aquaculture and Fisheries Programme Manager, Dr Peter Duncan, says these sources of information are vital to saving fish stocks: “We know that in the UK, 90% of fish sales are from just five species – tuna, cod, salmon, prawns and haddock. But such a limited range causes problems not only for these target species, but also for fish caught accidentally that are then thrown away. We need to change the situation so that maybe 50-70% of sales would come from the top five and alternatives could start appearing – pollack, gurnard, coley, dab, sprats. Such fish have recently been unfashionable or discarded, but they are, in reality, tasty, often cheaper and more sustainable.”


MCS says the upgraded, easier to use versions of their guides provide lots of options for trying something new. They also reveal the best choices for many of those traditional species such as farmed prawns, salmon, cold water prawns and Scottish North Sea Haddock, which have either been farmed organically or caught from sustainable or certified fisheries. However, the charity says consumers may be limited in making the right choices because of poor and confusing labelling at the shopping front line – the supermarket and fish shop.


“The use of a traffic light system to indicate the nutritional value of supermarket produce is now well established. However, sadly, the labelling of fish and fish products sold in supermarkets has not kept up. It is still virtually impossible to tell precisely where most fish and fish products have been caught,” continues Peter Duncan.


MCS will continue to work with the seafood industry and other environmental organisations to ensure that labelling offers more answers than questions, and is firmly on the agenda for fish retailers.