£35,000 raised so far - that's a whole heap of salt!

Hot off the press!

Enough to fill a Newlyn pilchard press salt cellar - sales of 'Salt of the Earth', the book of the portraits of the people who make Newlyn the unique fishing port it is have now exceeded £35 thousand pounds for @thefishmish !

The wonders of Wednesday

Port side gear up and ready to be mended...

as one of the Dreckly Boys heads away to sea...

not star of the morning but the Evening Star headed out of the gaps...

and chasing down the good ship Benediction...

dreckly followed by Cap'n Harris...

using a set of feathers and looking for one of the most elusive fish this year...

there's so many visiting boats in Newlyn they are moored three abreast at the end of the pontoon...

some new, some showing off classic lines like the Eve of St Mawes...

reflecting the boat building heritage of the Scillys and the graceful but oh-so-functional lines of the pilot boats that she is so closely modeled along...

power has been restored down the pontoons...

to keep the Boy's Buoys Toys connected...

ashore there are even bigger boy's toys waiting to get on with demolishing the old ice works...

on the market there's a few haddock on the ground and prices have picked up from last week's very poor showing...

though these guys are getting so rare they will soon cost as much as bass, though many would argue these are the tastiest fish swimming in the sea...

looking calm enough...

not so classic lines on the new end-of-quay lamp...

as compared to the old Victorian one that used to be powered by fish oil and then carbide...

the Algrie waits patiently with some of her sister ships in the background......

and the tug Mair waits for orders...

as the crew aboard this tidy ship stay slumbering.

Quality control aboard the Dreckly boat Bess

On the deck of the good ship Bess one of the Dreckly fleet, out comes the carapace gauge for lobster - and back over the side she goes!

The lobster fishery is worth over £1.5 million per annum - and for the last 30 years has been tightly run with fishermen at the very heart of the management process in cahoots with IFCA. See Eddie Derriman's excellent presentation slides that accompanied a talk of his at the National Lobster Hatchery conference.

Seafish Annual Fleet Survey launched

Seafish is putting the call out for participation in its Annual Economic Survey of the UK Fishing Fleet.

Over the summer months Seafish researchers will be visiting ports across the UK to speak to vessel owners and skippers from all fishing sectors in order to collect data on fishing and vessel costs. Our economists use this data to build an up-to-date picture of the economic performance the UK fishing fleet.

We pride ourselves on our capability to provide high quality, timely data and your participation in the survey will ensure the Welsh industry is accurately represented in our national estimates. This data can then be used by both industry and government to inform decision-making.

Alongside the data collection we will also be looking for stories for the second edition of our Quay Issues magazine. This publication looks to shine a spotlight on some of the innovative approaches taken to the business of fishing and to share ideas with fishing business owners around the country as well as the rest of the world.

The survey began on Monday 29 June and researchers are set to visit the Wales early in August. If you’re interested in taking part in the survey, or in contributing to Quay Issues, please contact Kirsten Milliken at kirsten.milliken@seafish.co.uk or on 0131 524 8668.

Landing shellfish and prime white fish on Tuesday night.

As the evening sun goes down the cloud descends even lower...

making Tom's life a little harder in watching over the Western Approaches...

not so for Mario at the end of another day aboard the good ship Harriet Eve...

as he lands crab and lobster from the 600 or so pots that he hauled today just off the Wolf Rock...

inside the market fish from the Resurgam are waiting to be graded...

while outside, the netter Trevose has just come alongside to put ashore his days work after hauling his trammel nets designed to fish for turbot and monk...

though the nets do a good job of picking up a good size of crab at the same time.

MMO launches the all-new Marine Information System (MIS)

Here's the latest from the MMO’s marine planning team who would like to tell you a little bit about a marine planning tool that has recently undergone some changes.

On the 8 July 2015 the MMO launched the redesigned Marine Information System (MIS). The MIS is a tool for all of those with an interest in England’s marine areas to explore marine plans including applicants for development licenses and decision-makers. It displays policies for all adopted marine plans in an accessible online format.

Updated features include:

• refreshed website layout providing a gateway to access all marine plans as they are developed across England’s marine area 
• policy considerations for marine plans that will inform plan users during application and decision-making processes 
• multi-layer Geographical Information System-based mapping information, allowing a locally focussed search of activities and resources, including information on approved marine licenses as well as those under consideration 
• a policy check tool which enables users to search for marine plan policies within a user defined geographical area 
• purpose-built accessibility for mobile devices and tablets.

You can access the MIS at: http://mis.marinemanagement.org.uk/

The 6000th post on Through the Gaps

As of today, there have been 6000 posts and 1 million 567 thousand and 485 page views recorded for Through the Gaps!

That first post, on May 6th 2006 included a photo of Stevenson's beam trawler AA just after she came in 'Through the Gaps' of a Friday evening - at the time there was still a Saturday morning fish auction. At that time the CFP, quotas and other controls give fishermen cause for great concern over the viability of a future in fishing. The port was home to a large but drastically reduced fleet of mainly trawlers, beam trawlers and netters. 

At the time, restricting boats by introducing 'days at sea' controls and huge reductions in quotas were of greatest concern.

Since then, the fleet in Newlyn has shrunk further - but despite the huge changes the remaining skippers and owners have invested heavily in new or newer boats - only two of the 2009 netting fleet work from the port today.  The crab and sardine fleets seeing the most growth.

So it seems fitting to mark the occasion with a plea from one South coast fishermen that must surely be echoed by many other small and inshore boat owners and skippers in Cornwall and around the UK.

The latest gripe affecting the large in number but small in catching capacity in the grand scheme of things is, 'latent capacity' - that's bureaucratic gobbledygook for, "if you haven't fished for certain types of fish over the last few years then you won't be able to do so in the future'. In other words, if a fisherman has decided to change fishing method for a few years for whatever reason- often the sound economical principle of maximising his boat's ability to generate an income for him and his family - and then wishes to return to a previous method - he can't.

"When fishing licences were first issued it was your birth right to receive one, everyone at that time who was fishing was legally was entitled because it was your immemorial right or more commonly known these days as public right to fish. Stealing any of your licence rights to entitlement under the draconian guise of latent capacity capping is an affront to the legal laws that they had to be issue under. Nowhere in the licence has it ever stated that you may lose your entitlement... if its not used. Fishermen were not warned about latent capacity capping so as they may have done something about it.

This is a complete INJUSTICE by mindless men in suits. Why, this is why, my July pressure stock entitlement for the fish available to me in my area is Plaice 275 kg, and Skate and Ray 175 kg its not enough to cover the diesel.

All I can catch is NON PRESSURE STOCK SPECIES, which puts me on course for latent capacity capping. MMO why did you not allocate the quotas fairly in the first place? You are now killing off hard working fishermen, are you PROUD of how you are trying to manage our fisheries?"

275Kg of Plaice is roughly 9Kg a day and 175 of Ray is around 5.6Kg per day.

To give you some idea just how little fish that amounts to, above is a box with 7Kg of grey mullet - now compare that with what this seal steals and and eats in the space of 30 minutes from INSIDE a trawl 1200 feet down!

It is estimated that there are between 50-60,000 thousand seals that live and feed in our inshore waters. That is five times the number of fishermen in total (12,160 in 2013).  There is, however, no meaningful relationship that can be drawn between the number of fish taken by seals and the amount caught by fishermen - except, of course, when seals decide to eat the contents of a fishermen's nets...

Monk fish heads after seals have eaten the rest of their bodies taken directly form the nets in 100m of water..

Seafish's most recent overview of the fishing industry can be seen here: