from Sunday Herald, 22 February 2009
Large amounts of dead mackerel have been dumped in the sea off north west Scotland, contaminating fish catches and damaging sales.
Fishermen from Kinlochbervie in Sutherland are complaining that their recent catches of cod, haddock and monkfish stink of rotting mackerel and so can’t be sold.
The Scottish pelagic fleet denies it is responsible for dumping the fish, and an investigation has been launched by the Scottish government and the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency.
Some reports from fishermen suggest that vast areas of the seabed north west of the Butt of Lewis have been covered with thousands of tonnes of dumped mackerel since the beginning of the year.
“It’s a terrible tonnage just wasted,” said Alan Grimmer, the head fish salesman in Kinlochbervie. “It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
A series of catches in recent weeks couldn’t be sold because they stank of decomposing mackerel, he said. Fish eat the dead flesh and end up smelling foul.
He accused pelagic boats of dumping undersized mackerel for commercial reasons. “They fill up their quota with better-sized mackerel because there’s more money in it,” he alleged.
According to Cathel Morrison, the manager of the John Muir Trust’s Sandwood Estate on the north west Sutherland coast, the dumping was “horrendous”. Local fishermen were “extremely upset” about the damage being done to their businesses.
The smell of decaying mackerel at the Kinlochbervie fish market was awful, he said. “It’s just an appalling waste. It may not be illegal, but it’s obviously highly immoral.”
Ian Mackay, the skipper for the Loch Inchard, reported picking up tonnes of dead mackerel in his nets 65 miles north west of Kinlochbervie in January. “I can’t understand why they had been dumped,” he said. “They seemed a good size.”
Skippers of crabber boats from Ullapool have also complained that their fishing had been virtually wiped out by mackerel dumping 20-25 miles west of the Butt of Lewis. Creels came up choked with dead mackerel but empty of crabs.
“There must have been a blanket of dead mackerel amounting to thousands of tonnes of fish lying on the bottom,” Heddle Costie, the skipper of the Heather K told Fishing News.
“It is totally immoral that such large quantities of fish should be dumped back into the sea to pollute the seabed and ruin another fisherman’s living.”
Costie pointed out that five Dutch-owned freezer trawlers had been in the area at the time, though their pelagic association denied responsibility. The Scottish pelagic fleet has also been blamed, but it also insisted it was not guilty.
According to Derek Duthie, the chief executive of the Scottish Pelagic Fishermen's Association, Scottish boats had not been in the areas mentioned in recent weeks. But he accepted that mackerel were sometimes dumped.
“Occasionally fishermen are forced to discard fish that fall under the minimum landing size due to the rules of the Common Fisheries Policy,” he said. But he pointed out that the Scottish fleet had gone to great lengths to minimise discards, including fitting jigging equipment to enable shoals to be sampled before deploying fishing gear.
The Scottish mackerel fishery, which caught 95,700 tonnes in 2007, was last month certified as environmentally sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. The fleet’s policy forbids the deliberate discarding of fish except where necessary to comply with minimum landing size regulations.
Initial investigations by the Scottish government suggested that the Scottish fleet was not to blame for dumping mackerel. “However, we will continue to investigate in conjunction with the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency,” said a government spokesman.
“Scotland’s determination to radically reduce the amount of fish dumped in Europe’s seas has made other member states sit up and take notice and we will continue to build on this successful approach.”
Environmentalists argued that discards are a huge waste of resources. “When undersized fish are thrown overboard they have neither had the chance to reproduce and contribute to the future of the stock, nor will they be caught later as large fish,” said Louize Hill, from WWF Scotland.
“Both these factors undermine the sustainable management of this important fishery. The technology exists to reduce discarding and should be adopted by all fleets.”
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