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Article: Ravaging trawls

The modern trawl- and seine vessels are brutally working their way through stones and reef, and are turning over the big stones, so that the peaks are evened out, and important and life-giving areas in the sea are left dead and deserted. This summer, one journalist, who specializes in fishery, said to us “if the trawling, today conducted at sea, had taken place on land, it would have been banned”.

Earlier, the fisherman used all his creativity and knowledge to avoid getting into stones and reef, today the situation is exactly the opposite. Now he uses all sorts of electronic devices, specific trawls and seines, and ropes enforced with wires, exactly to be able to approach the stones and reef in order to catch the much too small amounts of fish still left in the sea. Today even Norwegian lobster is caught in stones, and in this season the sand eel fishers in the North Sea have also had to move into stone grounds to catch their sand eel. Today, most of the fish living on the bottom are caught on the hard ground, on the stones and reef.

The Minister Council and the European Commission propose technical solutions like what is called “selective trawls” Gear and tools, which in theory can separate small fish from big, by using e.g. larger meshes in the trawls, and so called exit windows, through which the fish, you do not intend to catch, can escape. But this will be a theme without real content. The value of larger meshes and windows has always been and will continue to be neutralized by larger vessels, more brutal tools, and foul play at sea, where no effective control exists. The environmental groups suggests protected areas at sea, i.e. areas where fishing is either not allowed, or only with passive tools such as nets and hooks, but this proposal also lacks effective means for control at sea.

If you want to get to the brutal and resource- as well as nature destructive fishing, you have to ban the types of tools, which are designed especially for fishing in stone and rocks, and that is possible, if the will is there. To ban and control a prohibition against specific types of tools is a well acquired form of fishery control, and it can be conducted on land. With such a prohibition, it will not be necessary to have very many protected areas at sea. The fishery control authorities are already controlling the meshes of the tools on land, and while doing this it will be relatively unproblematic to control, whether the trawls and seines are manufactured for stones and reef or for the smooth bottom. A ban against the use of such tools will produce strong protests from the many fishermen who are today conducting such types of fishing. But these fishermen still haven’t given a reasonable explanation why five times as many fishermen could live from fishing 25 years ago, when no fishing with trawls and seines on stone and reef was conducted.

A prohibition against specific tools, like the one suggested, will obviously not solve all the vast and very serious problems in the sea, in the fish stocks, and within the fisheries, but it would be a step in the right direction.

Kurt Bertelsen Christensen

Chairman of The Danish Society For A Living Sea

September 2003