no fish .....i wonder why

[Old Smoothound]

Absolutely senseless. No thought for the sustainability of Fish stocks.

I watched a scalloper from Brixham go up and down all day a few months back. Totally destroyed the seabed it probably took out most of the pink corals in that part of
lyme bay along with good quantities of fish such as Cuckoo and Ballan Wrasse. When will they ever learn........

[Gremlin]

There was an agreement that local (Weymouth and nearby) scallopers would not scrape the reef areas off Lyme Bay.
The fan corals were being destroyed and deposited broken on the beaches.

This worked very well until recently when some out-of-area scallopers decided to do their own thing and ignore the guidelines.

As a result, Southern Sea Fisheries Committee are being asked to pass a Byelaw banning beams and scallop dredgers from 3 miles from the shoreline in these sensitive areas. Unfortunately this process, if successful, takes up to two years.

In the meantime the delicate coral reefs continue to be decimated by greedy outsiders.

[Pross]

I watched that Trawlermen series on BBC a few months back and the one boat which had just been launched and is the biggest on the British fleet caught 500 tons of mackeral on, I think, its first day. By my reckoning that is in the region of one million 1lb fish, even those tinsel flickers with the bin bags full of fish would have to go some way to match that. As well as the obvious effects the fish stocks have on our sport there are even more knock on effects that this has on the food chain with sea birds losing their natural source of food etc. Also, I know its hard to have sympathy for the trawlermen themselves as they've been the cause of the problem, but these huge catches are forcing the smaller boats into more and more dangerous areas as they try to find enough fish to make a living themselves which in turn increases the risks to the lifeboat crews that have to go to their aid if they get in trouble.