South coast Skates and Rays are now the focal point of a serious conservation project and you can be part of all this too. Any Skate or Ray that you catch will be a source of information for this study that is aimed specifically at our sea area. Please view the South Coast Skates and Rays info at sharktrust.org

Note that Ashlett Sea Angling Club will be collectively notifying the project with a spreadsheet of all club caught skates and Rays. This will save the project lots of admin hassle and individual postage costs. Following their April/May Competition there are already 22 rays recorded and 4 different species.

Fish Conservation - what about along the South Coast

Wow, Recreational Sea Anglers do count. For the ‘make some sense of it’ story have a peek at the current NFSA Quarterly Journal, another good reason to be a member of the NFSA! There are some interesting facts in the recent ‘Drew Report’ such as Recreational Sea Anglers that fish from their own boats are spending as much on their sea angling as about TWICE the total commercial value of fish landed in UK and Ireland. Beach anglers spend about the same amount of their money on sea fishing as the whole commercial value of landed fish!!! And the Charter Boat Angling annual spend is not far from that figure either!  

Also note the NFSA Diary is to be replaced by a New Handbook in 2005. For our own sakes please join as a NFSA Personal Member in 2006. The benefits to us all could be exceptional, whereby we actually go out and catch more and better quality fish. Is that not what we all want?? We may need to put a few more back.

Anyway with the conservation outlook already looking promising here is my two pence worth plus some more info below that I have appended to this article. As I see it there are two extremes to everything and fish stock conservation along the South Coast has it’s own two extremes. One extreme would be to stop all fishing from Margate to Lands End for 3 years or more. Obviously this will never happen as Recreational Sports Angling businesses such as Tackle Shops, Tackle Manufacturers and Charter Skippers would all be put out of business. Then there’s the Professional fisherman like Potters, Rod and Line Bass fisherman, Netters and Trawlermen who all need an income too. It is not easy to drop fishing as a trade and just do something else, if not impossible.

The other extreme is to leave it as it is right now! Blimey, that is a thought. Surely this can’t be an extreme? Well it is in my view as we are in a non-sustainable situation right now that is unless all we want to catch is the humble Dogfish. To continue as we do right now must be seen as an extreme position as everything else that we have done up until now is quite trivial. Controversial, well that’s me but even though many a good man and woman have sweated blood and tears to change things, it is slow, too slow. ‘Wakey, Wakey’ the fish are disappearing. In fact, current conservation measures are inadequate and the majority of most conservation has been by individuals and clubs with common sense and done completely voluntary as there is practically no policing. The ground rules that exist as governed by MAFF that will only affect those with a conscience or those that choose to toe the line. These laws currently restrict the amount of fish landed by species quotas and minimum sizes that us anglers and them fisherman take from the sea. ‘Smell the coffee’, it’s not them and us it is ‘we’ that we should be considering these new conservation ideas. ‘We’ all want the same thing and that is good quality fish to be around next year and another fifty or more years to come. The NFSA provide guidelines for minimum fish sizes that are generally larger than MAFF. Us fisherman certainly don’t count in any quota. These two things have edged most of us closer to accepting a level of conservation but it is playing round the edges of what is really required.

I remember a Cod ban that came in for a few months around 15 years ago that was supposed to stop all of ‘us’ landing any Cod. Well that certainly didn’t work; I witnessed it failing as every angler I knew just ignored it. However there are more Cod and Bass are being returned alive, purely because it is becoming more accepted and seen as the thing to do.

At the moment slowly but surely many responsible clubs make it their duty and many clubs have come through quite strong with good sound methods of running club events that are organized in such a way as to ‘save our fish’. The beach boys really showed the way as catch and release was happening on our shores well before the ‘boat boys’ started.  

Our ability to catch fish, with new techniques and new tackle technology has vastly improved our chances of catching the few fish left that are still available to us. So has the willingness to share knowledge. To a certain extent it is this that may have tricked me, over the last 5 years, into thinking that there are nearly as many fish as there used to be. Read any angling magazine and there is loads of information on marks, venues, ports and methods that in days of yore would have been local knowledge or kept secret. Not any more.

The question I have is this; how many fish APART from Silver Eels and Dogfish, actually swim off after being caught on a shore competition? In a competition the top rods have to fish fast to win. This can mean setting up multiple baited rigs. When the shoals come through you must catch a fish, leave it on the beach, get the next rig on, cast out and then sort the caught fish out. The fish become almost incidental as the points pile up. Species points can also become a big earner so we are putting smaller hooks out to catch ‘everything’ that swims.  What do points make? Prizes and that is where we are right now.

I belong to two clubs that now release nearly everything that is caught on Boat Comps. With the big fish weighed on the boat by taking the mid point of the needle swing on the scales, while other species have a set weight. Most fish that are lip hooked and reeled up from less than 80’ will swim off, after being handled well and quickly unhooked. While fish reeled up quickly from the deeps often die, Congers and Bass seem to survive, but do they?  Fish that are hooked in the gullet or deeper suffer too, as we try to recover our best intricate rigs. Even a well handled fish that has been pulled up from deep or wound in from far out that is deeply hooked will have its insides pulled around a bit. To save more pulling we could leave the hook in, maybe it helps but what real chance do they have? I don’t have the answers but should we ignore these facts.

Here is the punch line, the antis have nearly killed Fox Hunting so who do you think they will work on next? I for one intend to fish for another 30 years or more if I am lucky. I don’t really want to dodge the saboteurs or have to square up to them or have to sit and stew over it, especially when we have room and some time for tidying up our own act now.

Every Angling Club Committee, Club Member, Charter Skipper and Angling Authority has a responsibility to get this right in the next few years. We could be viewed as the guardians of the sea. Like the Freshwater anglers look after their waters and keep them in good healthy working order.

My preferred option after discussing this briefly with a Charter Boat owner and other sources would be for us to nominate nursery areas for certain species. This has been successful along the South Coast with the creation of Bass Nursery Areas during the summer months. These areas are not to be used for ‘Bassing’ by anyone during the set period of time. New areas will need policing possibly by those that are deprived of their professional fishing, in those areas. If for example the Western Solent, Christchurch Bay, Freshwater Reef became havens for all fish, we would see some remarkable changes within 3-5 years in those areas. It would mean too that fishing around these nursery areas would improve and that we will need to concentrate on other areas to get our fishing fix. It would be the beach anglers that will be required to stroll the beaches and the Boat Anglers that cross the nursery areas by boat that would be doing the effective checking or policing, by reporting any offenders. This could improve our ‘worth’ and enable us to continue our angling exploits all be it restricted. We will become less of a target for the antis and be seen more as ‘protectors of the seas’. We will be looking after our own fishing waters. We will be looking after our own recreational fishing future.

This is the only way that we will get fish stocks back up and working. Like they have done in the US, Canada, South Africa and Australia. We need a political party to put this on their agenda. The new ideas about rod licenses are a starter, lets see what happens. I certainly don’t begrudge paying £20 towards a responsible, useful department, that works. Anything as long as it helps.

There is this article:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,4-1390274,00.html  posted on the internet 5/12/04 also while writing my article.

Also, spookily, this article has appeared on the BBC website on 6/12/04, follow link below or read on

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4072503.stm

Fish areas 'need drastic action'

Commercial fishing should be banned in 30% of UK waters to save threatened species, an influential report says.

The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution said the capacity of the UK fishing fleet should be cut "to an environmentally sustainable level".

RCEP chairman Sir Tom Blundell told the BBC that the industry's future depended on such measures.

But fisheries minister Ben Bradshaw said steps already taken had first to be allowed to have an impact.

The report - Turning The Tide, Addressing The Impact Of Fisheries On The Marine Environment - says the sea should be treated in the same way as endangered land habitats.

It said: "Currently, the marine environment is regulated on the basis of a presumption in favour of fishing... we recommend that the presumption should be reversed."

The report warned that doing "too little, too late" would leave many sectors of the industry without a future.

Chance of recovery

It recommended establishing a network of marine protected areas within five years, with the closure to commercial fishing of 30% of the country's exclusive economic zone - an area which goes out to 200 nautical miles from the shore around Britain.

These protected areas could benefit the entire marine ecosystem, from spawning fish to deep-living organisms and the seabed itself, the RCEP said.

Similar reserves established on Georges Bank, off the north-east coast of North America, have seen species recoveries, with the density of scallops increasing up to 14-fold within five years.

While less than 0.5% of the world's oceans are protected, some countries have gone much further, with New Zealand and South Africa aiming to designate 10-20% of their waters as reserves.

The RCEP also said the UK should ensure the capacity of EU fleets fishing in its waters are also reduced.

Sir Tom said that without such measures, "many of the fish populations will just collapse".

He added: "We have almost all of the industrially fished populations down to between 15 and 20% throughout the world. This is a catastrophe."

The report urged the government to review the funding available to promote economic diversification in areas dependent on fishing.

But Hamish Morrison, chief executive of the Scottish Fisherman's Federation, said the recommendations were already out of date.

"We have a white fish fleet that has been cut in half, and the vessels that are left are fishing half-time," he said.

Mr Bradshaw told the BBC that the fight to preserve marine life was the "second biggest environmental challenge the world faces after climate change".

But he said it would be premature to implement the measures recommended by the RCEP.

"We need to give more time for the radical measures that we have already taken to have an impact," he said.

Global reserve system

The report focused on the impact of fishing in the north-east Atlantic.

It looked especially at the fisheries regulated by the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy and at the waters around the UK.

The running costs of reserves to protect the North and Irish Seas would be £9-15m annually, it said, compared with about £35m a year to run the national parks in England and Wales.

It said a global reserve system covering 30% of the oceans would cost £6.5-7.5bn a year, less than the £8-16bn spent in subsidies to commercial fisheries.

The RCEP also said some of the effects of current fishing practices were ruinous: a recently-introduced net with a mouth the size of 50 football pitches, for example, and bottom-trawlers which plough furrows up to 6m wide and 0.15m deep for many km across the seabed.

It cited a report by the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas which says the proportion of north-east Atlantic fish stocks within safe biological limits fell from 26% to 16% between 1996 and 2001.