fish- cod!!!

[Headfry]

great anger, have to get it of my chest.......sorry
did you see the news this morning?
They fish for prawns/shrimps- get cod so throw the cod back DEAD!!!!
its all to do with quotas!!!!!
How mad is this
gerrrrrrr very angry to hear of this

[Flummery]

So was I headfry. The real answer is not to up the quota (which is there to protect the cod) but to ban fishing in these areas. The Minister for Magic wouldn't risk the wrath of the fishermen by admitting this. And truly, if you were from a family of north east coast fishing people, would you want that answer?

[piskieinboots]

unbelievably totally barking!!

Hey, Headfry - I see you're an Oxfordshire gardener, me too

[smallblueplanet]

"He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "By the government's own figures, of the 186 million fish caught in UK waters last year, 117 million of them were thrown away dead as waste.

"That's actually 63% of the catch, so it's clear that we do need to do something about this."

......

"It's your livelihood and you spend your life trying to catch it and then you have to throw it back over the side. It's an impossible situation and, unless it is sorted out soon, we will all be finished." - BBC site

How true it'll all be finished - it sounds like modern fishing consists of hoovering the whole of the sea for whatever they want?! Its not just people living off these fish stocks.

[Two_Sheds]

My first thought was "what a waste, if its dead/dying at least eat it"

then I thought - 'propaganda' - this is what the fishing industry wants me to think, so they are green-lighted to go and fish Cod to extinction.

it can't be impossible to fish for prawns without vacuuming up every other species as well, can it?

[carlseawolf]

A good point raised here headfry , and as an ex-trawlermen i can understand your disgust and dismay at all this fish been wasted.
and your are all right about it's time for change and the present quota system does not work and fisherman have know this for years and tryed to get it changed but to no avail as it's EU law no british law your changing.
i was going to explain it all to you on here how it works but i figured your like to grow something next year so i'll clear up question as they are put across,
first

it can't be impossible to fish for prawns without vacuuming up every other species as well, can it?

your right it's not impossible and in scotland and ireland where a majority of the prawns live they use pots for them and the catch of fish is to the minimum , but this only works in shallow water so trawling is the only method for deep water.
trawling and the trawls are tailored to suit the type of fishing and spieces your after and prawns live on the seabed and feed in the mud and the cod are there feeding on them that is why they get caught.
why these fish get thrown back is because each boat has a by-catch or the total amount of non targeted fish on board , i think it's about a ratio of 80% prawns and 20% fish so any extra fish caught gets thrown over board because if the fisheries board him at sea and find this calculation is not correct then he gets taken into the nearest port and taken to court and fined as well as the 20% has to be no greater than the quota he has for the speices as quota is not interchangable between species.
the skipper has a log book he fills in at midnight and has to put in where he has been and total caught that day so he can't even keep the fish hoping that later on in the trip he catches more prawns to balance it out.
so as you see the system is a mess

[Two_Sheds]

Thanks Carl, But can the fishermen throw back the fish while its still alive please? I was given the impression that by the time its landed its all dead or dying. Is that true?

[Headfry]

In my heart of hearts, I cant blame the fishermen, its the system thats all wrong!

[carlseawolf]

Good question ;
it depends mainly on what type of fish you talk about so i'll stick with cod as the topic started there , a cod is classed as a demersal fish as meaning it lives a majority of it's life on or near the seabed and it contain an air bladder that it can inflate to alter it's bouyancy in the water , and it's this bladder that's it downfall in the deep water because as it's caught by the trawl and brought to the surface it inflates faster than the cod can deflate it so the cod gets full of air and even if it's still alive when it's thrown back over the side it stays on the surface and can not dive under because of the air in the belly so the seagulls and gannets pick it to pieces on the surface before the air has chance to get out.
i'm not sure what depth this accures but if the trawl been towed along the seabed don't kill the fish then floating on the surface belly up will.
the intresting thing about this is i fished from 1984 - 2000 and this was common place the fact about this tradejy and nothing been done about the quota system and it's noty just the prawn boats this applys to , as the wet fish boats have had this all the time and in the 90's the publcation fishing news ran pictures skippers had taken of coalfish ( similiar to pollock ) in vast numbers but had to throw away because of lack of quota for this species and it was sometimes up to 2000 stone of fish and they was not even bringing them on deck to through over and instead just untieing the trawl and letting them go free that way.

[smallblueplanet]

In my heart of hearts, I cant blame the fishermen, its the system thats all wrong!

Err I'm not making personal comments here but that is niave in the extreme. Why do we need a quota in the first place?

[Nicos]

Just slightly off point- but I think very important to share....

Last weekend's suppliment in a Saturday paper- Hugh FW suggested it's our responsibility to buy ( and not buy )certain sea creatures.
As the piece was about shell fish , this is what he said...

"Ten shellfish to seek out

Shellfish can be guilt-free seafood- much of it is responsibly harvested from healthy stocks or sustainably farmed.
1 Langousines, creel-caught
2 Brown crab
3 Blue velvet swimmer crab
4 Spider crab
5 Whelks
6 Farmed mussels
7 Dived scollops
8 Cockles, especially MSC- certified from Burry Inlet
9 Dived razor clams
10 Squid, British, jig-caught "

Well- I have to admit that if some of these nipped me no the nose, I wouldn't recognise them, nor where to buy them from on a weekly basis. Maybe that's another reason why they are so plentiful???

I'd like to see a list of fish to avoid - I think I may have seen one last week- I'll see if I can hunt it out.

[JanieB]

Considering we are an island race, we are deplorably ignorant about edible seafood.

[carlseawolf]

why do we need quotas ?
that's a good question small blue planet , because before 1971 there was none and there was no overfishing and no common fisheries policy and it was fairly self regulated and worked.
the introduction of quotas was put in place to make it a fair and level playing field and also new designs of boats and trawls ment they could catch more in a shorter time so it was put in place to protect stocks.
And i know the general line on fishermen is they are over paid and generally a greedy bunch and don't care about the marine enviroment and each to there own on that subject .
the only niave people where the goverment at the time to think giving the richest fishing ground in the EU at the time to our so called parteners to be overfished to the state it is now , and the stupid thing is british boats in general don't fish other EU waters as the fish we eat are in ours .
If the british goverment tommorow was to close down the british fleet and stop them fishing it would be to no avail as the other EU parteners can still fish / land in our waters and the only way of kicking them out is to get out of the EU and that will never happen.

[The Doctor]

I must admit I've never understood the EU system that allows other EU countries to rape our coastal waters of its natural fish stocks while we reduce the size of our own fleet!

[Flummery]

Err I'm not making personal comments here but that is niave in the extreme. Why do we need a quota in the first place?

The quotas are meant to stop over-fishing, SBP. The idea is that you are not allowed to bring into port more than a certain tonnage of, say, cod. therefore the cod will not be over-fished. However, if you catch cod when fishing for something that you CAN still catch, you are in deep doo-doos if you land it - so you have to throw it back. This can't possibly help to protect the species! But if you abandon the quotas people can fish as much cod as they like. The cod stocks have been going down for years. Supposedly they are marginally up this year. They won't be for long if this continues.