Fishing or not fishing?

The AIS track for the Morgenster shows her just off the coast - was she fishing or just dodging for weather?

Here's a comment from east coast fisherman Steve Barratt:

"Whilst I am being forced to dump fish due to the skate fishery being closed a 24m Belgian beamer is plundering the Thames Estuary. He is clearly visible on AIS, position 51.25.17N 001.28.06E the name of the vessel is MORGENSTER reg Z85. He is well inside the three mile limit. No answer on the phone from IFCA or the MMO so can't report it."

This is the Real Fish Fight!

This is what the fishing industry is up against!

The way of things

The hands of a fisherman.

A young man went to seek an important position at a large printing company. He passed the initial interview and was going to meet the director for the final interview. The director saw his resume, it was excellent. And asked, 

"Have you received a scholarship for school?"

The boy replied, " No". 

"It was your father who paid for your studies? "

"Yes." He replied. 

"Where does your father work? "

"My father is a Fisherman" 

The Director asked the young to show him his hands. The young man showed a pair of hands soft and perfect. 

"Have you ever helped your parents at their job?"

"Never, my parents always wanted me to study and read more books. Besides, he can do the job better than me."

The director said: -"I have got a request: When you go home today, go and wash the hands of your father and then come see me tomorrow morning."

The young felt his chance to get the job was high. When he returned to his house he asked his father if he would allow him to wash their hands. His father felt strange, happy, but with mixed feelings and showed their hands to his son. The young washed his hands, little by little. It was the first time that he noticed his father's hands were wrinkled and they had so many scars. Some bruises were so painful that his skin shuddered when he touched them. This was the first time that the young man recognized what it meant for this pair of hands to work every day to be able to pay for his study. The bruises on the hands were the price that he payed for their education, his school activities and his future. After cleaning his father's hands the young man stood in silence and began to tidy and clean up the wheelhouse. That night, father and son talked for a long time. 


The next morning, the young man went to the office of the director. The Director noticed the tears in the eyes of the young when he asked him: 

"Can you tell me what you did and what you learned yesterday?"

The boy replied: "I washed my father's hands and when I finished I stayed and cleaned his wheelhouse".

"Now I know what it is to appreciate and recognize that without my parents, I would not be who I am today.  By helping my father I now realize how difficult and hard it is to do something on my own.  I have come to appreciate the importance and the value in helping the family."

The director said, "This is what I look for in my people. I want to hire someone who can appreciate the help of others , a person who knows the hardship of others to do things, and a person who does not put money as his only goal in life".

"You are hired". 

A child that has been coddled, Protected and usually given him what he wants, develops a mentality of " I have the right ' and will always put himself first, ignoring the efforts of their parents. If we are this type of protective parent are we really showing love or are we destroying our children? You can give your child a big house , good food , computer classes , watch on a big screen TV. 

But when you're washing the floor or painting a wall , please let him experience that too. After eating have them wash the dishes with their brothers and sisters. It is not because you have no money to hire someone to do this it's because you want to love them the right way . No matter how rich you are, you want them to understand. One day your hair will have gray hair, like the father of this young man. 

The most important thing is that your child learns to appreciate the effort and to experience the difficulties and learn the ability to work with others to get things done. "

THE ROAD TO 'RECOVERY'

The Vice Chair of the NFFO South East committee explains how the industry is often wrongly accused of damaging the environment. 

The finger is often pointed at fishermen as being the direct cause of any damage done to seabeds in our waters. However, this is by no means the case.

The easy solution to the problem it seems is to convert an area into a ‘marine conservation zone’ (MCZ) controlling exactly what can and can’t be fished in the said area.

Folkestone has become the latest area to be selected as an MCZ, because of an abundance of Spoon Worms in the area, a species nearly unique to the South of England.

I recently attended a meeting to come up with an agenda to finance a scientific investigation into the damage that ground trawling does to the sea bed in Hythe Bay. Expectedly, the usual suspects have made calls for a total ban on all fishing until the area is ‘recovered’.

But what equates to ‘recovered’? We have no benchmark for this and no information on what these waters were like 100 years ago to compare it to. Of course, this is going to have an extremely damaging effect on the Folkestone fishing industry. There is no evidence whatsoever that fishing in this area has caused any damaging effect to the environment. Folkestone fishermen can also prove their gear has done no lasting damage to both the spoon worm and fish stocks, as both are so prolific in that area.

Compare this to the Thames where fishing has collapsed, where fishermen can only dream of seeing the catches of the Folkestone boats. The question needs to be asked, why is no scientific work going on in this area too? My fear is that ministers are waiting for the industry to totally collapse before it is ‘recovered’.

We continue to change the environment we live and work in. Many windfarms are now having problems with scouring; rocks and sand are being used to cover the cables and there is erosion around the turbines. It’s unfair that fishing gear is deemed to damage the environment, purely because it changes it! The ability to feed ourselves is in the national interest, is it not?!

Courtesy of the NFFo website:

International Fisheries movements - a presentation from France.

My French is not so good! - It would be good to have a translation of this conference from the University of Nantes.

Google translation of the intro.

"This presentation, based on geography doctoral thesis (defended at the University of Nantes in 2011), offers a critical look at an international own resistance movement to the fisheries sector.

Apprehended as one of the constituent components of the anti-globalization movement, this transnational protest movement of artisanal fishermen and fish workers (Fishworkers) is studied in several aspects: - the system of incumbents : this is to briefly present a typology of the multitude of actors who made ​​this resistance movement - the strategies implemented: the second part deals with the comments made ​​speeches, mobilized ideologies as well as modes shares used by militants; - historical dynamics crossings: that is, the main steps in the (short) existence of the artisanal fisheries dispute over the last thirty years. 

We conclude this presentation on current issues, perspectives and courses of action which is now facing the fishing alterglobalisation."

When Green is Grey - an excellent article in yesterday's Scotsman

The ‘discards ban’ is typical of patronising policies that couldn’t be better designed to bankrupt sustainable fisheries, argues Simon Collins

ONE of the striking things about the “green” movement, from big-G political parties to environmental NGOs, is how little connect it has with anything actually green. “Greys” would be a better collective noun, reflecting the largely urban context in which these people operate.

Oddly, antipathy to Greens is strongest in the very places you would have thought they would have the most appeal: rural and coastal communities. In the admittedly limited sample of places I have spent my adult life – rural Hampshire, a remote hamlet in the French Alps, farming communities in Umbria and Languedoc, and now Shetland – Greens have never been popular.

In some of these places, and especially where people have been close to the land or sea for generations, Greens are positively unpopular. Believe me, there is nothing more likely to raise the hackles of a struggling dairyman in Savoie or a fisherman in Shetland than the G-word. I suspect the same is true of farmers and fishermen all over Europe.

Perhaps the Greens do not find this odd at all. Perhaps they see themselves as bringers of the truth to ignorant, backward provincials. It would certainly fit with the patronising attitude of many of their representatives.

Patronising? Take the burning issue facing Shetland’s fishermen today – an unworkable “discards ban”, railroaded through the European Commission and Parliament by a well-funded Green lobby. And without even a pretence of consultation with the people most affected by it.

Ironically, the biggest opponents of discarding at sea – a practice actually promoted by the EU’s own regulations, remember – are fishermen themselves. The fishing industry would heartily welcome a sane management system that recognised the complexity of our marine environment; what it got was a simplistic response from bright, young and ignorant things that solves nothing.

It is not beyond the wit of man or woman to regulate fishing in our remarkably productive waters in a way that avoids discards. But designing the sort of management system that marries healthy fish stocks with the practicalities of sustainable catching is a fiddly business. It needs expertise, patience and an abundance of open-mindedness.

But this is where the Greens got involved: righteous zealots descending on Brussels with money to burn, much of it from shadowy American foundations and, incredibly, the EU itself.

In the land these people inhabit, doctrine matters more than experience, and proper consultation with those who actually know – fishermen, for example, with whole lifetimes of experience at sea – demands more humility than they can contemplate.

The result was a ban at discarding at sea – nothing wrong with dumping it on land, apparently – that could not have been better designed to bankrupt Scottish fishing fleets, operating in what are now some of the most productive seas in Europe.

In Shetland, where fishing is the mainstay of a highly successful community that has precious few alternatives, the social consequences would be devastating.

All this because of simplistic rules, driven by people who do not know and never tried to find out. And now that the fishing industry, from Shetland to all points south, is engaging with governments in a bid to rescue something rational from the whole debacle, all the Greens can think to do is to try and block any progress. Open-mindedness is not what these fanatics do.

Sometimes you wonder whether fishermen, like farmers, have been singled out by the Green movement because they are easier to bully than multinational conglomerates. Either way, the backlash in communities such as ours, and among farming families trying to make the best of their own daft rules, is readily understandable.

So how did the Greens get themselves into this position? How is it that a movement that started off with the best of intentions has ended up doing its utmost to destroy perfectly sustainable businesses in remote communities?

Perhaps it has something to do with the places many of these people live. Take a look at the next pile of campaigning leaflets pushed through your letterbox the next time an election comes up. How many Green candidates actually come from anywhere, well, green?

I suspect there is something more fundamentally awry here. The new generation of activists – articulate, highly educated, urban, insufferably smug – has a fundamentally different way of seeing “nature” than the rest of us. For these Greens, humans and the natural world are two different things, and should be kept apart.

From where they sit, concrete all around, the natural world somewhere “out there” should be returned to some pristine condition, as they suppose it to have been before humans appeared.

This notion could hardly be further from what the rest of us know, and have known since the dawn of time – that there is no separation between these things, that we are not aliens, that our responsibility to the planet derives from an intimate relationship with it, not divorce.

It is surely no accident that the few environmental NGOs that do have a real sense of responsibility to rural and coastal communities also have a strong physical presence in these same places. In Scotland, for example, the RSPB has excellent engagement with fishermen and farmers alike.

If it does not want to sink under the weight of its profoundly anti-rural, community-destroying fanaticism, the Green movement should consider following that example.

• Simon Collins is executive officer of the Shetland Fishermen’s Association.

It's #FishyFriday in Surrey!

Wet fish counter at the Fish Shop

Some Cornish fish has found its way on to the counter of the country's newest fish shop - nice one Duncan and Sue in Camberley!