Penultimate piscatorial Friday precedes present purchasing pandemonium and panic!

The Lisa's fish always look stunning and this week's rays are no exception...

which means the buying will be keen...

making sure they pay top dollar for the finest fresh fish on the market...

still early days before the cuttlefish season gets fully underway...

these perfect sized meal-for-two rays get the Cefas treatment...

and a blue flash too...

tools of the trade for the otolith hunter...

just the netter Ajax landed hake and whitefish on the market this morning.

Four days from now things don't look so good weather-wise!

The current T+84 chart synopsis courtesy of North-Isles Weather - and that little Catherine wheel just making its way towards Rockall means anybody at sea will be watching points!  In case you were wondering T+84 is four days from now!

2013 Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reform was approved!

The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reform was approved in a final plenary vote on Tuesday 10 December. The European Union’s new fisheries legislation can take effect in 2014.

In May this year the Council and European Parliament concluded political agreements on the basic regulation and market regulation in the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy. After proofreading and translation, the Council adopted the texts as their first reading position in October. In its second reading, the Parliament today adopted the Council’s first reading position without changes, which means there are no more legislative hurdles to pass.

Basic regulation 

The new basic regulation includes measures to halt overfishing and to reduce fish discards at sea.

“The reform will tackle the biggest problem of the Common Fisheries Policy, which is continued overfishing. The Council of the EU will now be obliged to act in a sustainable way when negotiating fishing quotas”, said rapporteur Ulrike Rodust (S&D, DE).


The approved legislative text of the basic regulation (Council’s first reading position, approved by Parliament without changes) - A summary of the main points in the basic regulation - European Parliament press release


Market regulation 

New marketing rules will ensure that consumers are better informed about the fish they buy, inter alia by requiring that labels give more details of the catch area or the type of gear used.


The approved legislative text of the market regulation (Council’s first reading position, approved by Parliament without changes)


Fisheries fund still being negotiated The European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF), which is the third and final part of the CFP reform, will not be finalised before the end of the year. The European Parliament and the Council are currently in trilogue negotiations following the adoption in October of the European Parliament’s position.

EU-Morocco agreement & deep-sea fisheries Today the European Parliament also adopted the EU-Morocco fisheries agreement as well as a new regulation on deep-sea fishing.

It's the dog's pollacks!

Fillet of pollack baked in foil after quickly crisping skin-side down in a fry pan - on the foil parcel add small quantities of diced onion, fennel, pepper, sun-dried toms and a good-sized knob of butter - bake for 15-20 minutes at 180º

Top value and top table flavour-wise - at this time of year pollack is a great fish to fill hungry mouths once they come in from the cold and wet. Easy to prepare, big white flakes of fish make for great baked dishes like the one above - nice one Cap'n Dwan!

Relatives of Hull trawler Gaul's missing crew: 'Agonising' wait for DNA tests on bodies found in Russia

Relatives of the missing crew of Hull trawler the Gaul, which was lost in 1974, tell James Campbell they have mixed emotions after hearing human remains have been found on the Russian coast. Now they face an agonising wait for test results on the bodies.

HOPE, anger, confusion. Relatives hardly know what to feel after human remains that could belong to the lost crew of the Gaul were found in Russia.

DNA tests are currently being carried out by the Russian authorities to identify what could be the remains of up to ten bodies. Families have been searching for answers for almost 40 years after the Gaul disappeared during a fierce storm in the Barents Sea in February 1974, 80 miles off Norway. The entire 36-man crew were lost.

RELATED ARTICLES Bodies of Hull trawler Gaul's missing crew 'found in Russia' 40 years after Cold War mystery sinking Gaul trawler mystery: 1999 DNA tests on four bodies found on Russian coast did not find match The trawler was eventually found in 1997 during a privately funded seabed survey. Only the remains of just three crewmen were discovered and were formally identified as factory charge-hand Stan Collier, 40, James Wales, 29, the Gaul's third engineer, and acting first mate Maurice Spurgeon, 38. Now, there are fresh hopes more missing men could be identified.

For Beryl Betts, the sense of purgatory is difficult to deal with. Her brother Billy Jones, 26, was a deckhand aboard the Gaul when it sank. "There will be mixed emotions for all the families," she said. "There will be relatives who will be over the moon by the news but I fear it could pose even more questions. "The wait now will be agonising. We have a hundred questions but we're not sure those answers will come." While pleased at the development, part of Beryl is very anxious about the outcome. "In a way, I wish they had only told us when they were absolutely sure," she said. "Now we have this uncertainty hanging over us right through Christmas. "It all settles down for a while and then something happens and it all comes flooding back. "This time feels more upsetting than before. I feel it is definitely them. There's a sense of trepidation."

While there have been false dawns in the past in the search for the missing men, Beryl is confident this time round. "I do feel 99 per cent sure these remains found belong to our crew members, but there is always that 1 per cent nagging at you," she said. "The way the police are acting suggests they are pretty confident and they have 18 family liaison officers on hand. "I don't think they would use those resources if they weren't pretty sure. They have been very good." Beryl, 74, of east Hull, hopes light will be shed on the troubling mystery. "We have been told there could be up to ten crew members," she said. "I just don't know how I will feel if one of them is my brother. It isn't something I have let myself think too much about. "There will never be closure until we find out the truth. "We have so many questions but I don't want to speculate at this stage. "We have been searching for answers for a long time and we are still not sure we will get them even now. "I feel we have been terribly let down up until now."

Humberside Police confirmed it was working with the Foreign Office to liaise with the Russian authorities over the discovery of the bodies buried under rocks by people living in the Rybachy peninsula in the Murmansk region in either 1974 or 1975, shortly after the Gaul disappeared. It is not clear why the discovery of the remains was not reported to the British authorities at the time although the loss of the Gaul happened at a time of extreme tension between the former Soviet Union and the West during the Cold War.

Another family member, who wished not to be named, also admits feeling mixed emotions. The man, who lost his dad, said: "Most people just don't believe it right now but we would like to think they are our relatives. "We are angry as this should have been done 40 years ago. "We have been let down so many times in the past and this has opened old wounds. "They are coming this week to take a swab for DNA tests. "But if it is my dad, it will at least provide some closure and we can finally pay our respects." The effects of that day still reverberate more almost 40 years on.

It was on January 22, 1974, Hull trawler the Gaul set sail for the Norwegian fishing grounds. Five days later she joined the fishing fleet in the Barents Sea and by Thursday, February 7, after ten days, the 66m trawler was ladened with 19 tonnes of boxed, frozen fish. Next day, she was spotted by another vessel in appalling weather conditions more than 70 miles north of Norway. And despite sending two private telegrams to Wick between 11.06am and 11.09am that day, the Gaul was never seen afloat again.

A formal investigation into the tragedy at the City Hall in autumn 1974 found "that Gaul capsized and foundered due to being overwhelmed by a succession of heavy seas". In April 1999, the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) published its findings following a detailed search of the vessel using underwater video cameras.

It also concluded the Gaul had been lost due to "downflooding through open weathertight doors and hatches on her trawl deck after being 'knocked down' by several large breaking waves." But speculation has persisted among members of the fishing community that the Gaul had been involved in Cold War intelligence gathering. The eventual admission by the Ministry of Defence that some trawlers were used for Russian spying missions added fuel to the suspicions.

The Gaul was discovered by a television crew in 1997, using the same co-ordinates given to the Government more than 20 years earlier. The ship was claimed to have been found lying near top-secret sensor equipment for monitoring submarine movements. But the MAIB dismissed the claims. Yet in the intervening years, a number of questions surrounding her disappearance – including why no distress signal was sent – have refused to go away. A resumed public inquiry into the tragedy was given the go-ahead by Deputy PM and East Hull MP John Prescott following the presentation of the MAIB report and took place in 2004. The report ruled out the possibility the Gaul deliberately sunk by the Soviet Union or pulled down by a submarine. It also concluded the vessel was lost in a storm.

Read more: http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/Relatives-Hull-trawler-Gaul-s-missing-crew/story-20306728-detail/story.html#ixzz2nBmUwJcU

Of Flotsam and Jetsam

Here's an extract from the well informed and highly objective pen of Nils Stope across the big pond where there seems to be just as much flotsam and jetsam as here. Nils watches the fishing vs environmental lobby world with the eyes of an all-American fish eagle homing in on its next supper!

Here's just two of Nils' exposes from his latest posting:

And on the subject of who’s doing and who’s not doing real research to better determine the status of our managed stocks – The Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and the University of Southern Mississippi, operating under a five year National Science Foundation grant and with industry partners currently including Garden State Seafood Association, the National Fisheries Institute Clam Committee, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Atlantic Capes Fisheries, Inc., LaMonica Fine Foods, Lunds Fisheries Inc., the National Fisheries Institute Scientific Monitoring Committee, Surfside Seafood Products, and L.D. Amory and Company of Hampton, started the Science Center for Marine Fisheries, or SCeMFiS in March of this year.

Eric Powell, the Center’s Director, says that it is “unique in being the only federal-industry partnership that permits the fishing industry to retain a leadership role in designing the science program. This assures that sustainable fisheries will remain a focus of project design and that the science products will directly address the issues faced by the fishing industry.”

Roger Mann, who is the Director at VIMS, said that research at SCeMFiS “will use peer-reviewed science to help improve sampling methods for fisheries surveys, enhance population-dynamics models, develop new approaches to reducing discard, reveal geographic and biological variations in stock structure and dynamics, among many other benefits.”

Compare the design and operation (and source of funding) of SCeMFiS to the above listed “research” initiatives that it’s hard to think were designed, bought and paid for with anything other than a particular goal in mind – the overly restrictive control then the closure of a fishery based on no new science and in spite of the fact that the existing management process has given every assurance that the fishery is being managed properly and sustainably. How would you rather our fisheries – or any of our natural resource dependent industries – be managed?

For more on the SCeMFiS see the VIMS March 27 press release
Sleeping with the enemy? – Many of us in the domestic fish and seafood business were taken by surprise by an announcement that Diversified Communications, the corporate owner of National Fisherman magazine, Pacific Marine Expo and the Seafood Source website, had partnered with Pew SeaWeb to produce a series of annual seafood sustainability “summits.”
If you haven’t been associated with fisheries issues for very long, or if you have been trying to ignore what’s being done to domestic seafood producers – those are the people who are on the wrong side of those “we are importing over 90% of our domestically consumed seafood” numbers – SeaWeb was one of the first organizations to “declare war” on US fishermen.

In a column for Commercial Fisheries News in April of 2001 I wrote: One of the more active efforts to influence public opinion on fisheries is spearheaded by SeaWeb. On its web site, SeaWeb describes itself as a "project designed to raise awareness of the world ocean and the life within it." Its primary funder is the Pew Charitable Trusts. Early in its existence, SeaWeb commissioned a public opinion survey to determine which ocean issues would best "engage the public interest.”
The introduction to the results of the survey, which was conducted for SeaWeb by the Mellman Group, stated "Americans believe the ocean's problems stem from many sources, but oil companies are seen as a prime culprit: In fact, 81% of Americans believe that oil spills are a very serious problem. This is followed by chemical runoff from large corporate farms (75% very serious), improperly treated water from towns near the coast (69%), contaminated seafood (65%), and trash, oil, and chemical runoff from streets (65%)." Overfishing evidently wasn't considered "a very serious problem" and was lumped in with "the loss of critical species" to make the cut as a "meaningful indicator" of trouble.

But in an article on the poll in SeaWeb's November 1996 monthly update, the only specific threat to the oceans mentioned was overfishing. Along with three paragraphs of vague generalities was this statement: "71% (of respondents) agree that overfishing is threatening the health and stability of the marine environment." Nothing about oil spills, runoff, contaminated seafood, or any of the other "problems" identified in the survey, only overfishing. Is this engaging or is it redirecting the public interest?”

There seemed to be much more redirecting than engaging (remember that back then the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound, AK was still fresh in peoples’ minds). 

Continuing in the same column:

In January 1998, SeaWeb announced the "Give Swordfish A Break" campaign, centered on a domestic consumer boycott of swordfish. In a 1998 article in the St. Petersburg Times (FL), titled "En Garde for Swordfish," reporter Bill Duryea detailed the SeaWeb strategy behind the "Give Swordfish A Break" campaign. "The first thing (Sea-Web Executive Director) Vikki Spruill did when she went looking for a fish to save did not have to do with fish at all," Duryea wrote.
Having decided that the most effective way to "engage the public interest" in ocean problems was through the food on their plate, Spruill, Duryea wrote, "needed a certain kind of fish. A poster fish, if you will. Shrimp and salmon rank at the top of the most popular seafoods, but half of the shrimp and salmon sold in the United States are farm-raised, tempering their status as overfished. Besides, shrimp lack a certain weightiness. 'We wanted something majestic,' said Spruill. Number 3 on the popularity list, according to Spruill, was swordfish, whose firm-fleshed steaks had become a mainstay of fashionable restaurants across the country."

It wasn’t about the swordfish. In fact, according to Mr. Duryea it wasn’t about any fish at all. It was nothing more than a hook (sorry!) to capture the public’s interest. Regardless of that, the US swordfish fishermen – who had been engaged in an ongoing and successful program to rebuild swordfish which predated Pew SeaWeb’s discovery of swordfish by years - paid dearly for this national “don’t eat swordfish” campaign which was underwritten with Pew dollars.

A quick examination of its website showed that SeaWeb has branched out quite a bit since its “formative years,” but those years have left their impressions on some of us with long memories (or reasonably organized archives). Diversified Communications will be putting together an advisory board for these joint sustainability summits. Who is appointed to this advisory board, and the connections of those appointees to the independent domestic seafood industry (i.e. not married to the jaundiced Pew view of domestic fisheries by virtue of direct or indirect funding) should have a tremendous impact on how this DivCom/Pew SeaWeb venture is viewed by the fishing industry.

We’ll be watching.

http://www.aifrb.org/

Fishwives Choir gets a shout out Down Under!

Elisabeth Jackson on Australia's ABC Radio station gives the girls a shout out!

Seems word has reached the other side of the planet that the Fishwives Choir might just storm this year's coveted number one spot in the charts at Christmas as artists vie to see off the totally-fab ricated X Factor francheese. With all the proceeds of the record going to support the work of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen the success of the record will have double appeal for those that purchase and download a copy.  Sadly, even now officers at the Mission in Newlyn are on call to provide support as the UK's most dangerous occupation claimed another casualty last week with the loss of a fisherman off Cadgwith on the Lizard.

Many of the wives in the choir have lost loved ones - and all have been directly associated with fishing lives lost at sea.

Take note, in order to contribute to the Christmas Chart sales, downloading copies of the song should not take place before December the 15th.

Google + appearances and radio