Thoughts on sustainable fishing

Now that I've found the fish, if my longline techniques work as hoped, it should be no problem going back and getting them as soon as the weather clears. Till now, I've been the most sustainable of fishermen - using no fuel, and catching no fish - sailing about dripping fresh water onto the sea as my ice slowly melts.

We know there's a problem with trawling. That's why we have quotas, regulations on net sizes and designs, limitations on days at sea, and boat scrappage incentives. More bureaucratic constraints to counter the effects of improved technology. A modern trawler is computerised and loaded with fantastic echo sounders and satellite information giving sea temperatures and of course GPS. Trawlers can now predict where fish are likely to be, go there directly and precisely, see the sea floor in 3D, see where the shoals of fish are and trawl their nets at just the right depth to scoop them up with clinical efficiency.

Pretty good really, apart from the indiscriminate nature of trawling - so that fish that weren't targetted or that are subject to quota are thrown back dead. And of course, the never mentioned dependency on cheap oil.

The solution often put forward to this industrial fishing is small scale line fishing, which almost eliminates by-catch and doesn't wreck the sea floor as beam trawling does. But there are problems with line fishing too!

Line fishing is only really productive on wrecks. The sea floor in the English Channel is mostly flat and barren, but there are thousands of wrecks dotted all over the place and fish congregate around them. The wrecks provide shelter and with all the nooks and crannies, a diverse environment where many species can flourish. I have a theory that the iron in the wrecks may promote life in the sea too, iron being a limiting factor for plankton. But that's just my theory. Anyway, the wrecks are where the fish are.

The wrecks have been mapped, because if you are trawling, catching your net on a wreck can wreck the net or worse. So trawlers like to go round the wrecks (though a skipper may go as close as he dares). The wrecks provide some shelter for the fish from the trawlers. Wrecks are like mini-conservation zones.

Except even the small scale fisherman is now armed with all he needs to exploit the wrecks. I have a pretty complete (I'm pretty sure) database of all the wrecks in the English Channel and beyond. And all the reefs, banks, rocky outcrops. I've got GPS - who hasn't? Many of the wrecks have their positions marked accurate to within 10 metres. So now many of the wrecks have nets laid alongide them. Which spoils things for line fishermen, so they favour the unnetted wrecks.

From my trip on Sunday, systematically trying wrecks further and further offshore, it is clear that the inshore wrecks are virtually empty of fish. You can catch some decent fish, but it takes time, jigging your lure about, waiting and waiting. On the wrecks further out, you drop your lure and get a hit right away. That's where the fish are.

But they are being cleaned out by line fishermen. Commercial guys and armies of anglers on charter boats. Look at this fishing report for Dartmouth based trips. The charter boats don't bother with the inshore wrecks any more. They go for the mid-Channel wrecks. Mid-Channel! The wrecks halfway across. Trouble is, if you go any further out, you meet the French line fishermen coming the other way! The wrecks in the middle are the last to be targetted. I heard that one of the most experienced commercial line fishermen working out of the Dart was considering going as far as the Western Approaches to find unspoiled wrecks. Previously productive wrecks were now producing nothing more than small pollack. Those fishermen with their 'sustainable' methods are clear-felling the fish populations on the wrecks!

Where will it end? It will end where the fish are so far off as to be uneconomical for the deisel-powered line fishermen to reach. And that's where I come in, able to cover great distances for free. If I get my methods sorted out, I'll be able to clean out the places other fishermen can't reach. And I'll be able to sell my fish as sustainably caught, (line caught, no by-catch, no harm to the sea-floor) and close to zero carbon consumption. The grim irony blackens any green credibility I may appear to possess.

Fish for the Freezer

Just a day's work from completing the outboard project on the cat, and I'm offered a trip on a friend's brand new turbo-diesel powered fishing boat. With the weather prospects for the next few days ruling out fishing on my own boat, I figured I could take the time out. Besides, if I took my laptop and we used the wreck finding program, I'd get the chance to see which wrecks were populated with fish. The boat does 30 knots, so in theory, we could get to some real out of the way wrecks. We can't sell any fish, being unlicensed, but there's room in my freezer.

The boat is not yet fitted with an auxiliary engine. This bothered me. Sailing is usually slower, but a mast and sails are much simpler and more reliable than an engine.

4:30 start! Not to catch a tide, or avoid bad weather later. Not to increase fishing time either, because we can always just keep fishing through the evening. But an early start seems to be a tradition amongst anglers, the grogginess from getting up in the night making a peculiar memorable day more likely.

The wind was light, but wind during the night had left quite a swell, and 10 miles out of Dartmouth we'd had to slow down to 8 knots or so. It would be hours before the swell died down, so we abandoned our objective of the Hurd Deep and the Channel islands and headed back towards Dartmouth, to where the swell was less, and then west to the Cat Banks. The ride was rough. It was a case of either wedging yourself in somewhere, or standing up and using your legs for suspension. Breakfast was off the menu, and even ordering breakfast would be difficult over the whine of the turbo.

Years ago, the Cat banks could be pretty reliable for cod, ling and pollack, and sometimes bass. Yesterday, we caught one cod and a few small pollack, but first time for me, a John Dory, the only fish I've heard of with a proper name. Never seen one before, but apparently this is a big one:

As the swell died, we made our way further out into the channel, wreck by wreck. Nothing but small pollack and pouting, that we threw back. We kept some of the bigger pollack.

Finally, at 4 pm, we got to a wreck about 40 miles from Dartmouth, between the shipping lanes. Here there were fish. Lots of them, and right away I had first a big cod, then a big pollack:

These were the biggest fish of the trip, looking less than spectacular after a night on ice. Normally, I'd fillet and freeze them right away, but this trip was different....

We caught several more cod, and many pollack, and we got fish every time we drifted back over a certain spot. When I say 'we', actually, I mean mostly 'me'! I got the John Dory, the biggest pollack, the biggest cod - in fact all the cod but one. So...

• I'm a better fisherman than the other three very experienced fisherman.
• I was dead lucky.
• I used the best lures.

It might be nice to think the first was true, but I think the third option is most likely. Three Jelltex shads with a 12 oz. Fishtek lumo pirk on the end. Like in the picture on the left. These weren't the actual lures I used - I left them on the boat. On the rig I used, the bottom shad was a Jelltex lumo shad, and that caught I'd guess one third of the fish I got, the rest hitting the pirk.

That the others didn't switch to what I was using straight away suggests that they were thinking I was just lucky, and that their efforts with live mackerel, sidewinders, pirks without the softbaits, softbaits without pirks etc were sure to pay off some time soon never happened. What makes this odder still is that the owner of the boat is the owner of Fishtek! The guy that designed and made the lures - so of course, we had heaps of Fishtek gear available.

Anyway, after a rewarding session like that, I make no apology here for rating Fishtek stuff and adding the link here. These lures are even better than the manufacturer claims! That's the case Pete isn't it? Either that, or you reckon it was all luck, because it couldn't be the first option could it?

The fishing stopped when the near spring tides got into full flow, and we could hardly get to the bottom any more with our lures. We set off back towards Dartmouth, intending to hit another wreck on the way when the flow had dropped a little, but still 35 miles off, the engine quit.

It was obviously a fuel problem, despite the gauge reading 1/4 full. We had a 20 litres tank, tipped that in, prime pumped the engine a couple of times and we were off again, but this time at a gentle fuel-conserving speed, and headed directly for Dartmouth.

3 miles out of Dartmouth, just as we were getting the camera out to take some snaps of our catch, the engine died again. Out of fuel. No auxiliary engine. The fuel gauge was still reading 1/4 full, so we unscrewed a bulkhead and some straps to pull out the tank. It was very nearly empty. The pickup pipe was fine, reaching close to the bottom. The best we could do was to hold the tank at an angle to gather the remaining fuel into a corner, and rerig the pickup pipe so that the end was submerged in the corner.

That got us home, but only just, and very late. The engine conked out again, right at the mooring. And I conked out before I could fillet and freeze the fish, so they were left covered in ice for the night.

A memorable day then, as intended I expect. Fish in the freezer, and I'll be having John Dory for lunch for the first time - it's supposed to be really great tasting. We'll see.

The fact that the inshore wrecks are now empty of fish has got me wondering again about sustainable fishing, but I haven't finished mulling over that, so I'll leave it for another posting.

A new outboard bracket - repairs and improvements

Nice fishing weather going by, but I have decided fitting an outboard to the cat has to be a high priority - apart from greatly easing the loading of ice and getting in and out of harbour (and potentially, unloading fish!) it will allow me to work the boat single-handed. Sometimes the weather is great... and all potential crew are busy doing other things.

So I've almost finished building an outboard bracket. The problem with many outboard brackets for catamarans is that they hang low enough under the cockpit floor to catch the waves, making noise and slowing the boat down. And I'd been told by the previous owner of the boat that going downwind in a storm, waves overtaking the boat from behind would frequently wash water right over the engines. So in trying to find a solution to these problems, I went to Millbrook in Cornwall to have a look around. Only one catamaran currently in the yard used outboards, but the brackets were an inspiring design:

This bracket is hinged at the front. Though the engine would need removing first, the bracket could potentially be raised level with the cockpit floor. However, the engines, like the engines I got with my catamaran, are 9.9 hp Yamaha's, weighing around 50kgs each. That's too much weight to lug around at sea, lifting an engine into a locker.

My new outboard is a 6hp Tohatsu, weighing 25 kg. That's light enough to be able to lift off the bracket and put into a locker (something Seafish require me to do at sea, to still qualify as an engineless fishing boat). So I figured, once I've put the engine away, why not put the bracket away too, and fill the gap in the cockpit floor with a removable floor section? That's what I'm building now, a bracket like the one on the cat in Millbrook, but removable rather than just hinged.

Here's the state of play so far:

Most of the stress will be borne by oak along the top and at the back. The rest is plywood epoxied together. Being a complex shape, I'm having to glass it in several goes, so it's taking a little time.

Meanwhile, I've rebuilt the winch that was playing up. Taking it apart, I saw that the wrong sort of grease had been used the last time the winch was serviced, causing some corrosion that I had to smooth to a good surface with wet/dry sandpaper, before rebuilding using the right grease. Good as new now. Unfortunately, I'll have to do the same to the other two winches on board, but it can wait.

The outboard has gone back to the shop for its first service.

I've sorted out the mess that was the spinnaker.

I'm changing the clips on the longline snoods from fiddly snaps to bigger clips - much easier to connect/disconnect. This should enable me to set my lines much more quickly. While I'm at it, I'm attaching a lead weight to the middle of the snoods to prevent them from spinning around the mainline. This should enable me to actually catch some fish.

I'm making other changes to simplify my use of downrigger lines. I'll post about this if it proves successful.

Enough! My last dose of epoxy on the outboard bracket is hard enough now to allow me to get on with the next session.

First trial of new techniques

Loaded six boxes of ice, and we were off into a messy seaway with a gradually fading wind. Perhaps we took our preference for fair weather a step too far...

Becalmed on the Skerries bank for the afternoon. A good spot to gather bait, but once we had some bait, we'd have the chore of refreshing their water to keep them alive, so we waited till the wind began again. When a breeze arrived, we fished for sandeels, and found only a couple of mackerel. Oh well, we can try for bait at the fishing grounds, or rely on softbaits.

The wind came from the south west, as did the tide, so we pulled up all sail and tried to get round Start Point before the tidal stream became to strong but we didn't make it. Managing only 4-5 knots in a light wind, having to tack through a current of 1-2 knots directly against us - do the trigonometry - no progress. It had been a long day, having been up at 5 to make preparations for the trip, and getting the ice and so on, so the prospect of sailing against the wind and tide round the point for most the night held no attractions. We decided to anchor at Hallsands:

and managed to dump our anchor right on the outer anchor symbol.

Hallsands at sunset:

and Start Point:

Our GPS has an anchor alarm function - if our position moves by just 20 metres, the alarm is fired. Unfortunately, the alarm isn't very loud at all, so I moved things around so I could sleep with my head next to the GPS.

The anchor held, but I was awoken at 2 am by the noise of waves slapping against the hulls. Looking out, I saw that the wind had increased and shifted to the north, the increased fetch allowing the waves to build. The wind was still pretty light though, so I lay awake considering the options. If the wind increased and the anchor didn't hold, we wouldn't have long to retrieve the anchor and get the sails up and before we were driven onto Lobster Rock, or Shoelodge Reef or something else hard and just a little way downwind. At the moment, the tide too was heading south, and with the wind and tide in the same direction, the water was relatively smooth. When the tide turned at 4 am, we'd have wind against tide, which builds waves much larger than just the wind can manage. We get no more sleep after that time. Then also, the tide would again prevent us from getting around Start Point.

At 3 am we went out into the dark to pull up the anchor and to raise the sails, to get around Start Point before the tide turned. Normally, it would be easier to raise the sails first, but since our route was downwind, we could do without the complications of sails flogging about in the dark as we were on the foredeck getting the anchor up. We could just raise the jib later.

Without a windlass, getting the anchor up can be hard work! So we lead the anchor rope across the coachroof to a sheet winch, and Fred winched from the cockpit as I pulled from the foredeck. We had to stop for a minute so Fred could come and see the sparkling fluorescence on the rope, but otherwise, it went smoothly. With just the jib, we went round Start Point slowly, but I didn't want to turn into the wind to enable us the get the mainsail up until we were clear of all those hazards, made more hazardous due to the dark.

With all sail set in the breeze, Fred sailed for the Catlin banks as the sun rose. A couple of hours later, I took over the watchkeeping and we arrived at 7 am. I set about laying a longline so that we could be fishing as I had breakfast.

The longline was fiddly to set up. All worked as planned, but there are a lot of lines involved and my makeshift line-handling equipment slowed things down, as did the snood clips being too small to easily connect to the mainline. It took 1.5 hours to set a length with 25 hooks. The next time would be quite a bit quicker, as some things I had to do wouldn't need doing again. I'd set the the length of line between the floats and the weights at 25 metres, so the lures would be close to the bottom:

The wind was light and fickle, and it took a fair bit of work to get the boat to sail for the banks at a gentle 1.5 knots - fast enough to make the lures wiggle, but slow enough to keep the mainline low. Storm jib and double reefed mainsail in a force 1-2!

After breakfast, we drifted over one of the banks, and I was disappointed to see on the fishfinder than the depth was closer to 35m than 25. Some of this would be due to the tidal rise, which I should have accounted for. So the lures were 10m from the bottom - not very useful, and tedious to pull it all in to reset. So we left it down, and sailed over slowly the other bank, which was a bit shallower, but not much.

A fisherman friend had come out in his boat and had a couple of small ling and small pollack, and I gave him a couple of buckets of ice to keep them fresh.

Hauling in the longline, we had our first fish with this method:

But that was it - a lot of work for one small pollack. Notice the green snood line is twisted round the mainline - I need to add weights to each snood to prevent this from happening.

So, we had tested the trolling longline idea, and found ways to improve it. And from the evidence of our poor haul, the view on the fishfinder, and our fisherman friend's catch, there weren't many fish about. So there seemed little point in resetting the longline.

More important was to try out my other new method, the improvised downrigger setup:

This worked just as planned, with the small weight on the fishing line sinking the float on the downrigger line. We were easily able to keep our lures close to the bottom sailing and up to 3 knots. Details of this system are available here. Unfortunately, trailing lures through nearly empty water doesn't make fish come by magic.

Our fisherman friend came back in the afternoon for more ice. He had a few fish - a few small ling, a few small pollack, and an embarrassingly small cod. I think he done better because he'd used live bait, and he had been running about all day trying one spot after the other. Oh well, I had plenty of ice to spare.

It was time to call it a day. A small pollack and a couple of mackerel is a pathetic haul, but I'd tested by setup, and found ways to make improvements for next time, and next time, we'll go further to find the fish, the Channel islands perhaps.

Meanwhile, some things to fix. The Rutland Charge regulator, which prevents my battery becoming over charged from the solar panel has died. I had to bypass it, but I need it repaired so that the battery can regain a full charge after each trip. I put some wooden wedges into the gap between the daggerboards and the daggerboard cases. One of the wedges has slipped down, jamming the daggerboard so that it can't be raised. Tricky. I'll have to winch it up, but before I can do that, I have a sheet winch to fix - one of them has become quite stiff of operate. And when all that's sorted out, I need to sort out my longline materials before I'll be ready again for another trip.

Our return journey was fast, as we set off with a favourable tide and wind. We raised the spinnaker for the first time, and I was disappointed to be slowly overtaken by a couple of monohulls close to the coast. When they furled their jibs and left their mainsails up, I remembered that whenever I am overtaken by another boat, it is usually because they are running their engine!

The spinnaker stayed up till we got to Berry Head, where there were lots of little boats fishing for mackerel. The sock refused to come down over the spinnaker, so we had to drop it onto the net between the hulls, full of wind as it was. Tricky, but we managed it, and sailed round to the mooring with just one tack, leaving behind a monohull that was motoring behind us.

Oh yes, I have a bundled up spinnaker in a bag to sort out too.

Off fishing

Finding crew has frequently been a problem. Offering a share of the catch doesn't count for much if the catch is tiny. I sail according to the weather, and if it blows hard for a week, there is no work. Work is 'occasional', and so only occasionally attractive to people with jobs and other commitments.

Today I have crew, booked for the next three days. The unpleasant weather is passing, and the wind is dying to a pleasant breeze. I have hopes that if my new techniques can catch a reasonable quantity of fish, I'll have less trouble in future finding crew.

Hurray! If you're really keen, you could watch us preparing to leave on the Fish Quay webcam, watch our departure on the Brixham Breakwater webcam, and monitor our progress across Start Bay on a much better webcam. If you watch carefully, you might see us stop by the Skerries on Start Bay to gather some sandeels, before disappearing into oblivion (round Start Point) to look for the bass. Good luck with that.

Now, where's my sign? Ah....at last -

Fair weather fisherman

The boat is ready to go, and for a change, crew is available. Winds are light, but tomorrow there'll be heavy downpours, so I'm postponing going out till Friday. The forecast for Friday till Sunday is perfect - light winds, and if the forecast is reliable, we should get following winds for both the trip out and the trip back.

When I tell people I'm trying to be a commercial fisherman, a phrase I often hear is 'out in all weathers'. As if fishermen are expected to endure everything the weather can throw at them and just carry on fishing. It's a strange idea because heavy weather just makes everything an effort - even going below to make a cup of tea can seem not worthwhile. Heavy weather is tiring, and makes accidents more likely. I'm a fair weather fisherman, and am glad to have it that way.

I guess the reason some fisherman have to be out there day after day is that they have so much invested in their boats, they can't afford to have the boat idle while they go and occupy themselves with gentler work. And perhaps some fishermen may not have other work to do. My boat was a tiny fraction of the cost of a trawler, and a day tied to the mooring buoy isn't a huge expense. So with other work available, I can choose my seasons and weather, even postponing a trip by a day to avoid rain!

Dinghy repairs, and new windows for the catamaran.

My dinghy is an old Wayfarer sailing dinghy, with a centreboard. When I returned from my last trip, it was half-full of water. It had sprung a leak at the junction of the centreboard case and the hull. I guess I had damaged it lugging boxes of ice on board. It was a weak point of thee dinghy that I'd considered removing, but I left it in place, the sooner to get fishing. False economy!

So now the dinghy is out the water, the centreboard case chopped away, the slot filled with offcuts of Airex foam, and then glassed over. While I'm working on the dinghy, I'll fit a chain I can use to lock the outboard in place. I had been taking the outboard home with me, but it is heavy and if I keep struggling back and forth with it, one day, I'll drop it in the water. Probably better to risk theft, and do what I can to make it difficult to steal.

Meanwhile, I have been given a whole set of new windows for the boat! New, thick sheets of Perspex, cut to shape. The original windows are old and crazed and ready for retirement. When I fit the new windows, I'll be able to sit indoors and keep watch. Even in pleasant weather, it's nice to get out of the sun and the wind for a while and relax. And when it's cold, it's great to leave the boat to the Autohelm, and sit inside with a cup of tea. Not sure when I'll get to fit the windows though. I need nice dry weather to do that, which is also fishing weather. Perhaps, if the wind falls really light, we might do it as we sail to the fishing grounds.