Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us again on
seafood matter. To day, I'm joined by doctor Colin Banister,
a man who has spent decades at the faulk Lane
between fishermen and fishery science. He's worked on deck with
skippers and his satin rooms where policy is shaped. He's
seen trust built and he's seen it strained.
Speaker 2: He also goes.
Speaker 1: On to reflect on what he learned early in his
career about a fishermen really views science and what science
sometimes gets wrong about fishermen. To day, I began by
asking Colin about his experience in the world of shellfish.
What you'll hear today testifies to a distinguished career.
Speaker 3: In the twenty years that I ran the Shelfish team,
I had a combination of personal involvement with individual projects
and also the supervisory role. But I was mainly in
charge of the relationships with London, and at that stage
I was dealing predominantly with middle ranking math staff grade
sevens occasionally Grade fives, the big boss as it were.
There was not a lot of interest from the grade
fives because they were basically dealing all the time with
the fish stock crises, and of course in that period
there was embryonic eu connections and all the rest of it.
But the first problem I had was an oyster. The
Foul survey for native oysters. My team man went down there,
Dennis Key, and he phoned me on the Tuesday or
the Wednesday, and he said, and I said, oh, how
are you getting on, Dennis, because I was completely green,
And he said, they're all dead. I said, what do
you mean, they're all dead? He said, they're all dead.
All the native oysters are dead plus or minus in
the main two rivers that run off the Foul Estuary,
the Peculiar River, and I can't remember the name of
the other one now, but it was on the other
side of the estuary and the main channel where the
oyster dredge, the sailing dredge fishery was also taking place,
was fetching up dead oysters. And it turned out to
be this highly contagious sort of viral thing, Banamia. And
the reason it had arrived was because some of the
oyster growers had bought what they didn't know at the time,
and nobody knew at the time, infected stock young oysters
from front and it turned out that they were cheaper
than normal and so the guys thought they were onto
a good thing. And then of course later the following
summer they were laid in the autumn because they were
the generations of oysters which, under normal circumstances were on
growing in the fowl and then picked and distributed to
Essex and the Essex Rivers and in some cases to
the solent. So if you had a source of a
disease oyster disease, oyster sources in the fowl, the first
thing you had to do was to close that fishery
and say, well, if there are any oysters left, you're
not damn well exporting them to the other parts of
oyster fraternity. So I had to go down to places
like West Mersey and explain all this and they would say,
who the hell are you, What the hell do you
know about oysters? Don't tell us. We can't do what
we normally do. This is our living, et cetera, et cetera.
So we had to introduce what was the controller deposit
order and all that sort of stuff. So that was
the first thing that was crisis management of the banamea disease.
But I also had a lobster team, small lobster team
and a small crab team, and I realized that we
needed to develop the assessment methodology for those species. There
were assessments. There had been some tagging of mature crabs,
particularly in the Channel, but people tend to think of
Crustacea as being the same. But there's a world of
difference between the lobsters and the crabs. The crabs are
relatively abundant, much more abundant than oysters.
Speaker 2: Naturally.
Speaker 3: It turned out that as I learned over the years,
and certainly talking to American scientists, because the American oyster
is not that different. Sorry, the American lobster is not
that different, but it is much more abundant and lick
cohabits in much high densities. But oysters are low for kundity,
relatively low numbers of progeny, and you can take larval
sampling gear all around the lobster fisheries and it's still
very difficult to find them because they're at low density
in the plankton. And then they settle down. And you
will notice that in Scotland in particular, the lobs of
fisheries tend to be curring on all those wonderful reefs
around Norse Berwick or in the Firth of Forth in
shore up the coast of Fife. It's probably some on
the north coast somewhere where you've got these ye that
the larvae settle in shelter. And at the same time,
at that time I inherited what had been the lobster
enhancement experiments whereby Conway have been rearing producing hatchery reared
lobsters and they were being put down in Bridlington Bay
and they were released over a period of two, three,
four five years on many sites in the relatively inshore
waters in Bridlington Bay, which was ideal habitat because it
had cobble. That's you know what a cobble shore is.
It's not like the reefs on the Scottish coast in
North Berwick for example, at all, but it is sort
of cobble on sand. And also in that period there
was the Bombing Range in Cowden off Cowden which they
raf were using with an atens for firing tank busting
shells in the range and those shells were about I
think six to nine inches long and about that round.
An ideal place for a juvenile lobster to settle if
it could find it and they they live in rocks
now on the west coast of Scotland, and they are oban.
I knew a diver who told me that lobsters there
were living in cracks in big rock walls, and then
they would disappear for three weeks, but they'd always come
back to those big cracks. So lobsters are very habitat
related m They don't produce many eggs, but they're quite
big eggs.
Speaker 1: And I always thought that, going back to my younger eves,
when I would be on the rocks with my father.
Speaker 2: It was the all the holes.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, that's true. And I know there is a
chap who used to live in John's Haven who reported
he didn't like math, he didn't like scientists much, but
he and I won't say any more than that, he
saw them in the little cracks in the harbor wall.
And I'd been to John's Haven since with my Pala.
Dick Shelton, who used to work at Cockery, is a
head of the salmon laboratory there for quite a number
of years. Dick actually lives in Celardike. While he did
live in Celardike, he now lives somewhere up south of Aberdeen,
but he observed lobsters in cracks and crevices in these
sorts of places, and crabs are different. They're much less
habitat specific of course, they're much more abundant. A lobster
produces probably up to a quarter of a million eggs,
quite large eggs. Crabs produce millions. You very rarely get
distributions of larvae in the surface waters because they're not
very dense. One of my team and a planktologist from
the lab did Neuston net sampling and Euston net is
the thing that floats along the surface of the water
on skids with a net behind it, and found lobsters
larvae in Bridlington Bay. It's the only place where they
have been found because there's a gyre south of the
harbor where they get condensed and carried round in the
gyre and then they settle. But they're very rare to
find in the surface water, and I think this is
all part of the biology of the lobster. Large eggs
relatively few, so whilst in the water in the water
columns so that they don't attract predators, and then settle
in shelter almost straight away. And we have some experiments
that science laboratories in the University Sanglier in Norwich many
years ago, where they were put in tanks and they
always dug burrows beside the tank so that they could
creep in. Crabs, on the other hand, produce millions of
eggs and little eggs that are widely distributed. You don't
see larval distributions in lobsters. But what we used to
do at the lab is use planked example as big
tubes basically toads through the water so that you could
find patches larval patches. So you'll find that that's off
the Humber and these are ones in the Southwest larval
patches in the western Channey. The other thing is that
certainly in the Channel and again in the Pentland Firth,
cancer Pagurus is migratory. The females migrate to the west.
And one of my sort of subsequent pals, who's a
chap named Coleman, who was doing a PhD at in Orkney,
where one of my scientists retired to and became a
heriot wat lecturer. Coleman tagged lobsters in sorry crabs mature
crabs in the Pentland first and they disappeared off to
the west coast. So there's this westward migration, and it's
always been a puzzle that they it's very difficult to
find that they close the loop that when they you know,
they don't seem there's no evidence of a return migration.
So it's a little bit like a conveyor belt going
down the channel across the Pentland Firth. But then there
must be other crabs that are resident now the migration
in the channel, and I'll just cut to another topic
that I entered into. There is a lot of gravel
dredging on the Shingle Bank south of Hastings and always
has been, and it's prime gravel, it's it's river iron
gravel pre dates probably they break in of the North
Sea into the channel during geological time and the autumn
migration of hen crabs in from the Eastern Channel to
the Central Channel around the Isle of Right and places
and then further down to Devon and to a certain
extent Cornwall. That is a westward migration which skirts in
the case of Shingle Bank area the bank itself, and
one of the fishermen there many years ago complained to
say that the gravel dredging was producing sediment which was
falling on the pots and making it making them less
efficient and deterring his seasonal crab fishery. So I did
get involved in that, and there is a process for
licensing the gravel. And I don't want to go into
the details in any particular way because some of it
is probably quite personal, confidential information. But he always said
that he was getting a raw deal because the sediment
disturbance in the area affected his best season of the year.
So I was involved in those sorts of issues. Then
when we go back to Bridlington Bay and.
Speaker 1: How far away was he from the regiing well.
Speaker 3: The dredging was taking place on the top of the
bank and it was probably about I don't know. I
didn't actually I don't know that detail, but it's probably
not much more than two or three miles.
Speaker 1: You can you can understand his concern.
Speaker 3: Oh, yes, absolutely, And he showed he has photographs of
the sediment on his traps. Now he did arrange for
me to assist him at a certain period. I couldn't
represent him as a civil servant. I was not on
that side of the house, but my biological mind could
contribute him information that was helpful to him to make
his case, and I did write a report at one
stage which was you know, was in Cefaz about the issue,
and you could show that there were there were issues
there that have never been resolved. And he's a very
respectful man. He says, you're retired, Colin, I won't bother
you with my issues. But nothing much has changed. And
in a sense, things like that stirred something in me,
and the shellfish team stirred something in me as a whole,
because it was much more intimately connected with the industry.
For reasons which I'll say in the next few minutes
that as a scientist I had a duty both to
promote the management, the sustainable management of stocks on behalf
of the industry, even though the industry was opposed to
that management in the sense that everything about management involves restrictions. Now,
one of the things that I think that is remarkable, Jim,
you know the hiatus, the blowback that took place in
the icy's recommendations on north Sea cod recently. Now, I
had all of that in two thousand and one when
we were first talking about the original icy's recommendation to
close the north Sea crab fishery. I went through all
of that at that time. This was before I joined
the shellfish team or ran the shelfish team. But in
that period the industry was totally against initially initially totally
against any form of tough management. But now to see
people like Mike Park who have a deep respect for
who I actually met way back in those two thousands,
early two thousands in an airport lounge in Norway, for example.
My acknowledge is that scientists have to say what they
have to say it provided of course that it is
soundly base. And the argument at the moment is about
still about the sub stock structure in the North Sea
and West of Scotland, how it links to the West
of Scotland, and particularly now that climate change has shifted
the distribution of the cod. And behind that story is
also the fact that climate change has changed, even in
my time in the two thousands, has changed the composition
of the plankton. There used to be a thing called
Calanus finmarchicus, a tiny little shrimp which was a springs
corner and was always around when the cod were feeding
in the spring. But finmarchicus in the early period of
the sort of mid two thousands and after the cod
the gadoid outbursts in the North Sea, which was in
the seventies, the high recruitment period which stimulated the growth
in the industry in the North Sea was replaced by
Calanus Fishmarchicus was displaced to the north by hell Glandicus,
which is a summer copypod and is there at the
wrong time for the early feeding regime of the cod.
So there's a story there that the plankton has changed,
and that that was influential in also the distributional changes
and the early and the abundance changes in the cod
stock at a certain period. When I hear people like
Mike park Now accepting and talking in the way scientists
do about the need for a well reasoned and necessary
restrictive management to try and achieve something like MSY, but
God has never been at MSY as such. But it's
heartwarming in a sense to realize that although the industry
is asking ICs to take another look at the relationship
between the cod stocks around the UK in the northern
part and how the southern north Sea changes interact with
the northern north Sea bits and so on and so forth,
to hear the industry expressing knowledgeable comments about those sorts
of things is a major step forward when you think
about it against the history of fishery science and fisheries management.
It's not easy to resolve, and I know ICs will
do it. It's best now. We discussed in the previous
podcast that scientists have to tell them tell you how
it is. Well, we do try and tell you how
it is. But I have learned so many lessons over
the years that I need to take into account much
much more of the effect of management decisions on the industry,
to understand the implications, to make sure therefore that the
scientists do actually get it right and can justify some
of the things that are being said or use in
the absence of full knowledge right. So other things that
I that I was involved in. The hatchery reared lobsters
were put out in Bridlington Bay, so we decided we
needed to monitor the Bridlington fishery in order to see
whether any of them had survived and how they'd grown.
And so in the late eighties and the early nineties
I went to see quite a number of summers for
a fortnight out of Brilington with Bob Crawford on his
little Cobal the deb C, and we were fishing predominantly
out to six or eight miles at the most between
Skipsey and down to Hornsey Well with and Tea really way,
and so I did two or three weeks with my staff,
and so in some years my staff did it and
I wasn't able to go for various reasons connected with
the team. But I did do quite a number of
years watching and measuring and checking on the keyside the
lobsters that we landed from Debuc to see whether we
could find the micro tags that had been inserted in
the hatch relear juveniles. And then so me and my
colleagues wrote papers about the fact that hattery reared lobsters
put down on the right habitat had survived. They weren't
caught in big numbers, and it was quite difficult to
know how many of them had survived, because obviously what
you're catching is is only a small sample. We knew
that they survived, we knew that they'd grown, and we
were able to discuss the growth rate, and we could
assess the potential for the use of enhancement techniques in
Spain in areas where, provided there was sufficient habitat, it
would be worthwhile to hatchery advast expense, because of course
running a hatchery is not cheap. I've had a sort
of soft spot for that work, and I've used my
team of use in the past the WC data for
quite a number of different things, and that was where
I first really understood lobster potting. And I can understand
completely the feeling that comes upon a fisherman who gets
a jolly good basket of keepers. After the physical pulley hauly,
You're getting these damned things up out of the water.
And even with modern kit, you know, with pothoulers and
all the rest of it, and fast scatter on her
hands and open decks, with a really nice working arrangement,
you still have to lift the damn pot out of
the water and stick it on the tray and bait
it and stack it, and you're shooting it. You don't
catch your leg in the coil a rope and go
over the side.
Speaker 1: I had I have to see colin one of the
things that I phoned staggered in as far as progress
was concerned on that one. As a youngster after school
or weekends or school holidays, I would go out no
my father then it was a fifty four foot wooden
boat seen ittter and certain times of the year there
would be fishing seeing it. Other times to the year
they would be fishing for lobsters. So let's say that
was I would be in my teens and I just
loved a day.
Speaker 2: Out at sea.
Speaker 1: And sometimes at certain times of the year when the
lobsters were moore in shore. On the shore, they would
tow small boats out and two or three of us
would go out in the small boats and go in
and out around the rocks and pull the creoles and
pots as they are called down there.
Speaker 2: And then I.
Speaker 1: Was in my let's say my fifties, so that's from
a teens. In the next time, I was based in
Scrubster on the North coast, and a guy I was
friendly with says the fancy coming out with me a day,
says yeah, I would loved it. Well, if I go
back my father their boat, there were five of a crew,
obviously a skipper in the wheel loose and the four
crew men on the deck. I went out with this guy.
He had the same number of kreels shooting the creels
and haul in them as when go back in my
younger days, and he was on his own he had
a haller, but not just the hauler, but going back
the younger days, there would be a laser in the kreel.
They would loosen the laser, tie some either fish with
small fish or carcasses remains after from philipt In, I
have a tight they would tie that to the kreel
and then retie the laser. But the advancements I thought
was unbelievable. Because this guy he had we pocket. He
would take up almost like a bungee club out it
would open the poach, he'd put the bed and clip
the bungee.
Speaker 2: I thought that.
Speaker 1: And with a haul in and shooting, what advancements over
that remot be years?
Speaker 3: Yes, And I have to admit that I haven't been
on a modern vessel these days to see how much
it has changed. But I mean I I've always taken
my hat off to these guys, and of course mainly
in the summertime. I've written somewhere in a recent thing
that I sent off with my CV was that we
always seemed to be leaving at two o'clock in the
morning and then getting back in it too o'clock in
the afternoon. And I think in nose stays Bridlington had
a dance place that went on until about two o'clock
in the morning, so that the Harbor Lights as it
was called, was still booming away as we were scrambling
down to get on board deb C and go off
and do our stuff between Skipsy and Hornsey and with
and Sy and of course at that stage we were
using Decca. Bob just said it all by eyesight basically,
because you know, there was Red House Farm which has
now fallen in because the older s coast is crumbling.
There was Mappleton Tower, Mappleton Church, the caravan site at Skips.
He was obvious, you know, you knew where you were.
But you were also going on the Green Channel over
the Decker Navigator at that time, and so you know
there were but the place was covered in Dan's all
over the place, and there was high jinks. Sometimes occasionally
somebody would shoot his pots over somebody else and there'd
be a bit of fisty cuffs on the key side.
Late at that he shook all that sort of cave,
don't you.
Speaker 1: There's officially scientists doing there. He's based and I think
a whole university. Magnus Johnson, Oh yes, I know him, Yes,
I've done a podcast with him and some of his PhD.
I was staggered with what Magnus told me that he says,
if you take it from Spurnhead, where would the northern
point be.
Speaker 3: Well, Flamboroughhead was a lot of Yes, yeah, from a
spurn Head to flamber Here he reckoned that over one
hundred thousand grills. Yes, absolutely. Oh no, Well, Bridlington is
the prime fishery in the UK, there's no question about it.
But and of course in WC never went much more
beyond six to eight. There was then at that time
a chapel in Graham Young who'd got a keel boat
and he was going off forty miles because he'd been
a diver fishing, diving or forty to sixty miles off
the in the wartime, not the convoy route but the
coastal shipping route, and he was diving on rex and
retrieving brass and all that sort of caper. And he
learned and he suddenly realized that some of these offside
rex as he called, and the forty mile off jobs
were full of very big lobsters. Because the bigger the lobster,
the more shelter it seems to want or it likes shelter,
and some of the ones that live on the West coast,
for example, sit there and the cracks and the rocks
out in Oburn Bay and move for two three weeks,
and then they disappear for a bit, and then they
come back and there are some very big lobsters sitting
in those wedges. Finally used to be quite a good
spot as well because of the brig and the juvenile
lobsters would sit in crevices behind the drapes of sea
lettuce hanging on the rocks.
Speaker 1: On Filey brig. So it was all of that.
Speaker 3: Anyway, we did a lot of recapture work with the
catcher reared ones. We found that there was a proportion
of the landings that were from the hatchery reared areas
and that they and I tracked them in the recaptured
data at least to age six. But then the work
had to be That work was stopped by the Chief
Scientist Group in London because according to them, we'd prove
the point. But the economics of hatchery rearing and recapture
compared to managing a natural fishery probably don't stack up
particularly well. Although I've spoken with the Whitby Hatchery quite
a lot about how much they're doing. And of course
off the northeast coast, we had the collapse of the
crab and the lobster fisheries two or three years ago.
Now many of the boats from red car and Places
and Hartleypool have been sold off and the fishermen have
given up. But I think that Joe Redford is trying
to rear lobsters and rejuvenate that fishery. So in addition
to all of that, I had a sub team that
was working on crab in the channel. Dave Bennett and
people of that nature were doing lot and Brenda Thompson
were doing some of the crab larval surveys whose pictures
i've shown you, and that the pictures are from the
report that I wrote in two thousand and nine when
i'd been grabbed by the sagp and i'll tell you
about that in just a few moments.
Speaker 1: I can see you're still grabbed by the airs as.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, yes, Well in a way, Jim, I
don't think I'll be talking to you now if it
hadn't been for that, because I think at our age
we need an interest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, it's just that just amusing me with being
your command.
Speaker 3: Well, Pieter Hunt and I worked well together. We were
brilliant together. And he and I we used to go
up to London and we had lots and lots of discussions,
but they never came to anything, because in the old
days math would sometimes put out a consultation for a
particular increase in the minimum size or other measures like
banning the scrubbing, of banning the landing of buried lobsters,
which did eventually come in in the late twenty teens.
But I noticed quite an increase in fishing news in
the last couple of years of prosecutions for scrubbing.
Speaker 1: Am I really just ask you just no, Colin. When
you go back between crab and lobster over theedy appeared
is that crabs the descriptions and fishermen use it's lake.
They have a herem and the meal will guard all
those females and they can be quite aggressive and guarding.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, I think that. I think they're promiscuous in
that sense. And it's coincized there's the water temperature cycle.
So traditionally the lobster fishery, in particular in Bridlington and
in other parts of the coast would start. They would
get the pots out in spring so that they would
get the first flush of lobsters that were moving with
the increase in the water temperature, and then of course
they would go in later in the in the season,
in the early summer to those that were carrying eggs
would be shedding the eggs, and then that they would
be molting, and then they would be feeding up again.
So when we went out in August, they'd already molted,
and they'd already dropped their eggs, and they'd already been
inseminated by some hairy male and they would be looked
after by the male for a certain period and then
he'd go off and do it to it so another
female somewhere. So there was this sort of very complex
behavioral issue about that conditioned the seasonality of the fishery
as well as a condition of the animal, because obviously
there was a delay between the newly molted animal hardening
and then being able to do its stuff. There are
a lot of much more studies biological studies in the
United States with tomorrow's americanas which is several factors more abundance.
You're talking about forty tons of life has landed in Maine,
you know, compared to two thousand to three thousand in
the UK, so the whole scale of those fisheres is different.
I went out, I mean, I did a couple of
MSc assessments in the Gulf of Maine when after I'd retired,
and I went up to all the fishermen's meetings and
all that sort of caper, and we had a great time.
In those days, America was the place that was a
pleasure to visit. I wouldn't go there now for God's sake.
And you know, the thing was that the women would
run raffles and things like that. They'd hire a holiday
in in the autumn and celebrate the season. So you
could go to fishermen's meetings in Lots and Portland and
various ports like that, and the whole fraternity would be there,
having traveled two hundred miles in some cases, and they'd
have a jamboree basically, and the women would be selling
hat and this, that and the other in the foyer, and
the blokes would be showing the main lobs of fishery
committees and all that sort of thing and getting their
management sorted and they had fisheries management plans years ago
because of those sorts of things, And at one stage
I did some refereeing for one of the North American
lobster reports, and a subsequent colleague of mine, Mike Bell,
did it again later. And my best pal in the
fisheries and the made my fisheries team on lobsters was
Steve Lovewell and then Julian Addison, who was a very
good PhD student. So we had a we had a
core of people that understood the evolution of the lobster
fisheries and the biological relationships and other things, but we
couldn't get the dann things managed properly now when we
look at the obviously, because you can't age the things satisfactorily.
Although we did do work. The Chief Scientist Group at
the time I was in the team did some contracts
with an Australian guy and he was using the eye
stalk pigment liper fusion, which when you use ultraviolet light,
glows and it turned out that the accumulation of lip
of fusion in the eye was time dependent. So I
gave him quite a lot of the recaptures that we
had in Bridlington Bay, which were of different age. They were,
of course they were different sizes. That was what we
were measuring, and then we gave them to this guy
who was working at the University of Leicester and using
the I stalk pigment technique. He had a proxy age
for these things and you know some of the lobsters
would appear on the basis of that to live between
thirteen forty years, the really big monsters, and they don't
actually reached landing size until about four or five. That
was the information that we had.
Speaker 1: Well a Guya recently did one with the Maritime States. Yes, yes, Canada.
He reckoned whether they're different there, he reckoned there were
seven years before there were marketable size.
Speaker 3: It's quite likely, quite likely.
Speaker 1: The other thing I was going to ask you, Colin,
when you see about your eight I'm not picking you
up totally one hundred percent agree when you say the
tannage of the fishery over there compared to the UK.
But the point I just wanted to ask, because I've
been thinking about it a lot since, doing a lot
of talk with people over there, do you feel it's
a bigger fishery or just the fact that it's about
ten or more tames the coast lane of the UK.
Speaker 3: Oh. Yeah, there is certainly the coastline, and no question
about it. But I think they are much more more
abundant on the ground. And I was going to I
was just going to say, before you asked your question,
there was a lady named Diane Cowans who was in Maine.
I think she was a biologist, and she turned up
at these meetings and you know the term fosse king
where you walk along the beach and turn the stones over.
When she did those in the mid coast of Maine.
I mean, it's a lovely coastline. You know, there's some
great spots, coves, all that sort of thing. But the
intertidal range on the coast, if you turn boulders over,
you'll see hundreds of juvenile, newly settled lobster larvae, newly
settled scrabbling about. You will never you never find that
except after a storm on an English East coast site.
The density factor is significant. And when I've tried retired,
I did MSc assessments for the main fishery and the
Gulf of Saint Lawrence fishery. I went up to the
Magdalen Islands. By God, that was an experience. It was wintertime.
The plane was forced down to quite a low altitude.
I think we flew from Montreal or somewhere, and I
realized that the tops of the pine trees were higher
than the wings on either side of the aircraft. I mean,
we weren't in danger because it was a wide valley,
but nevertheless, we're going down the valley. And then we
landed on the tiny air strip somewhere. I can't remember
the name now I could find it, I suppose. And
there was a wall at the end of the runway,
and it was one of the old Dutch planes with
the twin props, and he suddenly put on full reverse
thrust so that the props screamed and we just pulled
up before the wall at the end, you know, that
sort of narrow thing. That's I loved. I loved French Canadians.
They are very French, they are they are Canadian as well.
Speaker 2: And dependent away from Canada for yes.
Speaker 3: And I actually had a couple of working groups in Quebec.
MSc working groups in Quebec in the winter time, By god,
was it cold, you know, all that kind.
Speaker 1: Of case we were there. It's a number of years ago. Now,
my wife's sister lives out there, and we were visiting
them between Christmas and New Year because when the fishing
in Thistry sort of closes down here, so there's a
chance for us to go on holiday.
Speaker 4: And my mustache eighth particles.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I do. I can't remember it, but
I in those days I spoke quite good French because
I learned quite a bit of French. I've got a
bit of a feel for languages and I have a
good French accent. It has been commented upon by quite
a lot of French colleagues that I did. I didn't
sound like a native, but they knew I wasn't a
complete brit And you know, French Canadian is different, so
they couldn't understand my French. And it was partly because
the vocabulary is different. Yeah, you know, monsieur parably we yeah, okay,
well you come to the folk club tonight sort of thing,
you know. And that's the side of being a scientist
that has always been wonderful good. You know, I can
listen to these Breton type singers in the French Canadian content.
I went to a club one night and they were
just traditional. Well, it was like Lewis and Clark going
over to the West coast of America. You know, there's
a kind of an outback feeling to these sorts of places,
and I loved it. Really, It's one of the high
points of my life, these sorts of trips after retiring
and being independent, but doing MSc type assessments, you were
trying to bring something to the table. And I still
think the MSc system is a good one because in
order to be certified, and the certification has become very important,
as you well know, in the industry, and that was
one of the tragedies of the Scottish industry associated with
the breakdown really in the pelagic discussions in recent years
that the industry began to understand that if you had
a harvest control rules, it's caused you know, a rule
of thumb that says if the catch per effort falls
below a certain level, action will be automatically taken to
restore that fishery. You don't have to then depend on
persuading an administrator in London that they need to do something.
Now it's sort of as it were written into the
relationship between an MSc assessment and the status of the fishery,
and I've always thought that that was a very good thing.
Lobster's failed several times in my time for various reasons
that we couldn't fulfill all of the criteria. And the
next thing I just want to say is I did
spend a lot of time doing coastal intertidal cockle and
muscle surveys in the wash. For example, my team did,
and I've walked the wash sands on the Norfolk coast
for cockles, huge, big area, very interesting dynamics in the wash.
It's a sort of an anti clock eye circulation, a
lot of wind driven drift at certain seasons of the year,
and big fluctuations in settlement from year to year, which
makes management very difficult. And then I had a guy
that was working on scallops. Peter Dare, brilliant biologist. His
hobby was collecting nest information from buzzards and he would
climb up trees all over East Anglia and look at
the nests and work out the breeding rate and all
the rest of it. I think he's written a book
about He's dead now, bless him to three years ago.
But Peter was an old fashioned biologist and I used
to do cockle surveys in opposite learnsle in the on
the Slanridian sands there, and you know, just like in
the Thames Estuary, you do a quadrat every fifty meters
or every hundred meters and dig a square meter of
the sand and count and measure the cockles, and then
go on another fifty meters contour the diagram and raise
it up to a biomass estimate and then set your
harvest rate on that basis. So I learned all of
those sorts of things, and as you can imagine, given
my personality in particular, I became the go to person
for all this sort of stuff, and I could I
think I learned to tell the tale in an accessible
manner to these folk in the industry. Why are we
doing it? What are we getting out of it? How
is it going to affect you? How should it affect you?
Is it necessary? Why is it necessary? So when we
look at an assessment, you know that the yield curve
has usually got a hump in it. There's a peak
which is corresponding roughly to MSY maximum sustainable you. And
there are modern techniques, the so called virtual population analysis,
where you back calculate to the amount of stock that's
on the ground. Well, with an age based assessment, that's
not straightforward, but you do know that the difference between
a thirty centimeter place and the sixty centimeter place is
the difference in age between say five and thirty five.
But with the length business and the molting with crustacea,
it's not very clear how you can relate the size
distribution to age, and so that makes calculating mortality rate
a bit more difficult. But the shot of all of
the crab assessments and the lobster assessments has been that
they have been on the basis of the model with
the reservations. As I could go into at greater depth,
but I've sort of alluded to them, assuming that we're
our conversion from lengths to age using tagging data from
the past, you know, tag recapture data. You tag lobsters
at this year, and you catch them three years later
and they've molted twice. How do you know, Well, the
size is more than thirty percent bigger than it was
when you tagged it. Yeah, so that's the sort of picture.
It's a molting frequency diagram plus the tag recapture information yeah, So,
assuming those models are correct, lobsters have been fully exploited
for a long time, but they haven't collapsed. There are
changes in the catch rate. In other words, density is varied.
But as the shellfish fisheries expanded, and in England Wales
it's expanded a lot, the average number of pops used
has gone up from the small hundreds to two to
three thousand in some cases. Then the crabbers have now
got viv a vessels and by the way, those crabbers
have all got licenses still they bought up latent licenses.
We haven't got. The licensing system hasn't frozen the number
of vessels. So you've got some of the big vivier
vessels that have been fishing in the Southwest, the crab
with twenty thousand plus pots Colin.
Speaker 1: When you say that, it just brings me back again.
I often think about it and go back to what
I was saying my father when he was I would
say that would be the fifties and early sixties.
Speaker 2: They would have been fishing.
Speaker 1: And they well into the well, no fifties and well
into the sixties, and they never had more than one
hundred kreels fishing and they could make a decent living,
and that was five.
Speaker 2: Of a crew.
Speaker 1: There's two men board and some of the bigger, bigger
crabbers that are into thousands of krils, and the two
men crabbers I lost seven or eight hundred krills And
I just wonder the team's colin could they get up
Baaland the fish market is supply and demand supplies down,
the demand goes up.
Speaker 4: So is there a basis they were to cantalless get
the place up so there is not too expensive for
the consumer to buy it.
Speaker 1: But it gives a There must be a way of
getting a ballance. The wrong way to do it is
put more ports out.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean before COVID, I mean I have to
tell you that to me, teams meetings are a real pain.
It's so difficult, particularly as well. I must talk about
this before we sign off today, about the crab and Loves,
the Manager group and all these new groups that have
been formed to get management plans under the Fisheries Act.
But they're all teams meetings. There's often between twenty and
thirty or forty people on the team's meeting. You can't
read the room now. In the last meetings I had
in London would be probably twenty nineteen, and I can
remember this and I used to practice it because the
one advantage of say, SAGB had a crustacean committee at
that time, and we had three meetings a year and
you could talk face to face with these guys and
it wasn't a threat because this was just a reporting meeting,
not a decision taking meeting, and you could discuss something
like you just raised that point, and I might say,
it makes sense to have a fishery's assessment and then
a target harvest immortality, which is nominally sustainable. But then
there is market side to this whole question, and what
you've just described is something that we could take into
account and get some kind of compromised deal that would
say no more effort in order to balance the fishery now,
and then gradually reduce effort in steps to get the
benefit of the market related price rise. And you could
envision that over a ten year period or something like that.
In some ways it's too late for that, but you
could go up. But Bill would say a Bill, you know,
sitting on the other side of the table, you're not
bloody telling me how many plots I've got to pish
because if the fuel price goes up tomorrow or the
price on the market goes down tomorrow, I've got another
hundred and fifty pots in the garage and I'm going
to put them out because my balance sheet requires X amount.
Speaker 2: But that itself is not a good argument.
Speaker 3: No, no, but that's what I'd say. Yeah, And then
you could say ding ding ding. In coffee time, we'd
have coffee and you could go up to this guy
and say, do you really mean that? Well, he said yes,
because we've just had a fuel rise, as it happened
in that meeting. This was way back in those days.
And I said, well, in a way, that means whenever
ever going to solve the problem. Well, he said, there
is another thing here. I don't want what do you
know about fishing. You're telling me how to run my business.
And I said, well, no, but if you look at
the herring story, look at the cod recovery story, that
there is another dimension here. You're just un lucky that
lobsters and crabs haven't collapsed in any shape or form.
This is obviously in twenty nineteen, surprisingly, so I don't
know what that means. It means that we haven't got
something quite right. But interestingly, Jim, there's a guy at
the Marine Laboratory Aberdeen named Mosquito is a Portuguese guy
who wrote a paper in twenty fifteen or after twenty fifteen,
twenty eighteen, or something like that, twenty nineteen. Perhaps since
twenty fifteen, crab landings have been declining. Now, of course
this year they're on the floor because of the octopus fishery,
but they've all they were already declining in the last
ten years despite the increased in effort. And the other
side of it is that the inshore guys along the
Channel coast and in the southwest in particular off Cornwall
are in serious trouble this year because crab cacchies have
been either non existent or replaced by octopus. There's water
temperature is now at this time of the year already
several degrees higher than the long term average.
Speaker 1: The most recent podcast released yesterday as a you made
no embraced Stewart.
Speaker 3: Yes I know him well online?
Speaker 1: Okay, well, yes, yeah, he's done the report on the
octopus bloom as he calls it, and he's he's actually
apart from everything else as you say empty in kreels,
in their fullish empty shells. He says, there's actually evidence
now of scallops.
Speaker 2: Yes, been been.
Speaker 1: They'll come across a port and it's absolutely full of scallops,
and I reckon that the octopus are cutching them, putting
them in the ports, and it's like, well, that's that's
next week's meals.
Speaker 2: Storing them.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I think there is serious climate change
in the Southwest in particular, and obviously the octopus seasons
where the season has been dominated by the octopus. And
of course there was originally a phase like this on
off the Portuguese and Spanish coast about three or four
years ago, so that sort of effect has sort of
come up since then. There are problems, of course in
the in the Channel Islands as well. I think Jersey
and Guernsey have had quite significantly difficult fisheries this year,
so that the lookout.
Speaker 2: Is not good.
Speaker 3: The problem is of course that in certain parts.
Speaker 1: Of the industry.
Speaker 3: I mean you see in fishing news little articles about
one man bands from Hastings or the Sussex Ports which
from jim Parts is a member of sa GB, and
there's a lot of creole building and selling pots and stuff,
and the fishery and Eastern Channel has collapse. It's not
properly assessed by Seafast for reasons which I've never understood.
But the whole thing is certainly in a period of
very significant change. And Bryce Stewart is a real old
fashioned style zoologist. I don't mean to say he's behind
the times, but he works for the MBA and he's
got access to resources that I don't have now, so
I have.
Speaker 1: To read it.
Speaker 3: Mosquito wrote up this paper in twenty fifteen or eighteen,
whenever it was. There's no doubt at all that lots
of landings have increased from the low landings from the
low hundreds up to two thy five hundred tons and
have definitely stabilized or this year they will have decreased, probably,
but the fishery can't go on forever increasing. But we're
talking about a huge increase in the crab landings up
to about twenty zerousand tons and now it's down to
fifteen thousand tons over the last ten years. That's the
total England, England and Wales landings, or North Sea and
Channel landings. The Channel fishery which was harvested at roughly
msy for crab, there's a female, it's a hen only
fishery is now overfished. The latest Sea Pass assessment in
twenty twenty three show that the Southwest crab had already
gone too high to deliver msy. And so wherever you
look at the moment and Beshley Pool, who is secretary
of the Western Channel Fishermen's Groups, is tearing her hair out,
and she's actually taking part in the f rep next
week in Norwich, and I'll talk to her personally because
her members are in serious trouble this year. Some are
catching octopus, some have switched to but I don't I
don't think that's sustainable. The market is probably limited to
a degree, and obviously it's it's very destabilizing. And if
you can't catch your annual income, what do you do
Unless you've actually got money put by, you're in queer Street.
So it doesn't look too good. I mean, I did
participate in a lot of icy stuff in the year
has gone past, but we'll skip that for the moment.
I was chaired the Shelvish Committee. I chaired what was
called the Consultant Committee in the old days. Which is
the committee that had all of the sort of scientific
groups reporting to it, and then I reported from that
meeting to the to what was called the Bureau, which
was all of the heads of mission for the for
the ICYS countries. That was a very special period for
me and I enjoyed it greatly. But you know it's
an aside in the sense of this conversation, So let
me just say that in the two thousands mid two thousands,
towards the end of the two thousands, Peter Hunt made
me an honorary life member of SAGB and I spent
about five or eight years doing two things. We obtained
money to develop a shellfish industry development strategy, and I
reviewed all of the statistics and the biology and descriptions
of the fisheries of all of the main shellfish species,
the marketable shellfish species whilst the crab, crawfish, the main
mollus ones, cockles and mussels, and one or two others
around the coast. And I used these what was then
the Sea Fisheries Committee data. This was mainly England and
Wales stuff, and I produced a very large document with
about twenty five files of stuff and lots of pictures
and lots of descriptions. It was then sent to the
Seafish Industry Authority and they completely chopped it up into
They said it was too big to publish, and it's
so right. It would have been something like two hundred
pages or something and lots and lots of illustrations. So
they chopped it up and it was published in summary form.
Didn't even keep a summary because it was Newton. Basically,
as far as I was concerned, I put all this
work in. I've still got a folder of files pdf
files of all the data and my words, but it
would have been a pretty heavy tone. Then we got
an EU contract to do the management of ground Crabfisher's report.
This big thing that I showed you earlier on it
was published by the SAGB from an EU grant and
it is, if I say so myself, a complete summary
of the landing trends between nineteen hundred, nineteen sixty and
two thousand and five. It shows logbook date on the
fishermen that we had it, It shows the pictures of
the crab of the crab larval distributions such as they were,
and it discusses management and it looked at the potential
for effort management by looking at the relationship between pot
numbers and vessel length for the English fleet from Seafast Logbook. Now,
I would have carried on with that work if I'd
been in charge of the shellfish team, but I don't
know what happened in the interim. I know Ga Laddis
Lambert is now the head of Shellfish and I went
to see her in the lab about two months ago,
and I've handed over a lot of references from the
past scientific references. I have taken part in many, many
sort of conferences, including the status of the cockle and
mussel stocks in the Wash, which was a very large
symposium volume that was that we produced at one stage.
But these are gray literature, not scientific papers. We used
to have a publication called Shellfish News in Seafas and
I don't think that that's produced any longer, but it
had articles about crockle management in it. So there is
historical record. And you know, if I was to live
long enough, you know, I could do another twenty podcasts
about all these sorts of things. But the point is
that on the strength of that I have become a
sort of a walking encyclopedia of the past, but the
detail is now gone, if you see what I mean.
I know the principles. But I became a director of
Shellfish Association Limited leading up to about ten years ago.
Because Fishmonger's Hall, who'd always given us rooms free of
charge and the conference free of charge and all the
rest of it, a new regime at the Hall decided
that that wasn't an appropriate relationship any longer, and so
we became a limited company. And my directorship of that
company lapses at the end of next year I think,
or this yes, probably sometime in the middle of next year.
What it means is that I go to the board meetings.
I am an honorary chairman of the Crustacean Committee. Mike
Roach is now the chair of the Crustacean Committee NFF
guy who did do his PhD with Magnus Johnson. There's
another PhD working for him, Nick Burt or something who's
going to give a talk at the Shellfish Conference this
summer in June. And Rome Betts, who was doing a
sociological study under Magnus. So I have contacts with Magnus
about those sorts of things. The thing about the SAGB
is that it's also obviously very involved in the mollusk
industry trying to get a smooth pathway for exporters of
rope grown muscles in the Channel. For example, John Homyard's
project still sending them to France through the whistles and
wheels that Brexit has created. In my personal view, Brexit
has been a complete disaster, as many of us always
thought it would be, and the border posts in France
can be very difficult, and people who buy crabs on
the coast down on the South coast and stick them
in a vivier Laurie really want to get them through
the customs posts at the other side as quickly as possible.
For obvious reasons. My daughter lives in Central Spain, and
when I used to go to Central Spain to be
with her, you could get Scottish crabs at the local supermarket.
They've been trucked down to gavalan Is where she lives,
which is sort of quite inland, and it's a French
supermarket and they've got Scottish brown crabs on the counter there.
But problems that we've had with veterinary certification inspectors in
France making life difficult just because they want to justify
their posting. You know, these things are tricky, and obviously
we have messy waters in the UK. The water quality
around the coast is not as pristine as it is
off the Scottish coast. In most many of the English
coastal waters, the bacterial quality varies between Class A and
Class SPEED depending on the time of year and whether
there are storms, and whether there's overflow of rain water
from some of the storm outflows and all this kind
of caper. So you know, the SAGB plays a big
role in trying to smooth out all of those difficulties.
And then suddenly you'll have heard of crustacean compassion, have
you yep, yes, Well we have a battle royal with them,
don't we, because they're all about humane killing. They have
a huge budget, and they had the London School of
Economic Scientific study about doual lobsters and crabs feel pain
and allegedly they do, and all of that sort of thing.
So a lot of the discussions in SAGB have been
around those sorts of problems, and David Jarrett, who's the director,
is run off his feet most of the time running
around trying to troubleshoot all of these major issues. And
I'm not deeply engaged in the detail, but i am
sitting on the Crustacean Committee and the Mollus Committee, and
also the Council which reviews our position on these items.
So I'm sort of reasonably connected to these more modern
issues on which had I been in Sea Fast years
ago and translated that position to now, I would probably
have had quite a detailed knowledge and opinion. So I'm
very aware of how the industry is struggling with these
sorts of issues. The one great thing that SAGB did
some years ago was to secure exports of crabs to China,
and in some cases there was a serious issue about cambium,
which the Chinese said we shouldn't buy crabs with which
have got high cabmium loads. So I was quite involved
some years ago now in researching the role of cabmium
in metabolism and all the rest of it. And you know,
SAGB had to bite on the bullet and formed a
group of the crab industry in order to try and
deal with the crab and cabia. Miss you. We have
been allowed to export crabs after establishing a monitoring program
and crabs. There is a self monitoring arrangement with the
crab group of the SAGB, so that if CABMIM were
to increase beyond certain based levels, those crab would not
be eligible for export to China. But by and large
we've resecured that trade to a certain degree.
Speaker 1: But I did that podcast recently with that guy in
China and one of the things that I sayst them
that says what we found was quite bizarre, strange.
Speaker 2: I said, China, come along.
Speaker 1: It was a year or two ago now and no
crab from the UK because there was a problem with
the water and there was a bacteria, so that market
wasn't available to a fisherman and then a Dutch company
they started buying it. So they come into the market
and do you know where they were putting it?
Speaker 2: China? Yeah, and it was fine.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is okay now to certainly within certain limits.
There is a limit and if they're not allowed to
breach the limit, but if they're within limits, as he.
Speaker 1: Said himself, the one problem we have to not get
cluded over with the politics commitment.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, well, there has been a visitation this last
ten days from the Chinese authorities to verify what we're
doing in this context, and arsenic has now crept up
as being an additional requirement. David Jared has taken them
round ports to see how things are progressing in terms
of monitoring and all the rest of it. So that
is always going to be a potentially live issue. But
I have to say that within the last year, I
think at the last conference we had a lecture short
lecture online presentation online in the conference room by the
British Embassy in Beijing, which are trying very hard to
market agricultural and fisheries products in China.
Speaker 1: There and there.
Speaker 3: There are certainly exports going from the EU as well,
so things are not as bad as they have been,
but you never know whether the sword of dam the
Fleees is going to fall, and I think that the
welfare issue is a significant one. We also have the
project going which I'm not involved in directly, but because
of things like banding of lobster clause. There's a Dutch
company and the guy's been going round the ports and
I think he's been to Scotland as well. His name
eludes me. I've got it somewhere. It's a core binder
machine and it will be about the size of a
pc is square, but it will be about the size
of sort of like a foot by a foot by
a foot in the old measurements, and it will be
something that you can insert the clause of the lobster.
A proper plastic sheeting will wrap round the clause so
that you don't have to nick them. That's one of
the things. We have people who are contracted now to
do webs just general communications on the internet on behalf
of the association, and recipes and all those sorts of things.
So SAGB is trying very hard and it is of
Great Britain, so there should be some Scottish members, probably
not in the minority, but still very valuable. David jard
is in his early sixties. I don't know what's going
to happen when he retires, and who would the where
was all to do that job. He started as an
oyster cultivator and a muscle cultivator in the River X
and then his family situation changed and he came up
to SAGB, leaving that business behind and he's been fantastic.
He's always lobbying the MPs at what's in the parliamentary
group that's associated with shellfish, and of course changes of
government haven't helped. Because Daniel Zeichner was speaking at our
conference last year and he had been around the industry
reports on two or three occasions, getting a brief when
he was in opposition. So he became a fisheries minister
for several months, but then for some reason was mysteriously
removed by the powers of being government and replaced by
Angela Eagle. Well, I think she's actually doing quite a
good job. But Daniel Zeichner was very easy to get
on with and was very understanding of the industry, even
though he's MP for Cambridge. So those are the sorts
of things which have been part of my hinterland now
for you know, a long time. At a certain period
I was chairman of the Buckland Foundation. I don't know
whether you've heard of Frank Buckland, but he wrote the
salmon fisheries reports in the eighteen eighties. He did a
lot report in the eighteen eighties, and he was an
animal collector. He ate all the animals that he collected
at some stage or other, and he was a very
sort of either Edward Wardion or Victorian type of character.
He'd been in the Lifeguards, I think, or the horse, Yes,
the lifeguards. But he was a zoologist, a hobby zoologist.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 3: When he died, his family eventually folded up in nineteen
twenty two, and he gave and they gave a substantial
amount of money to be invested. The Buckland Foundation was formed,
so they had a Buckland lecture every year or every
second year on fisheries topics of all sorts, and people
like who's the chap in Shetland.
Speaker 1: That's always talking John Goodland?
Speaker 3: Yes, John, for example, gave one, Barrdese gave one, and
I was the Buckland professor in twenty fifteen when I
told them the Cord recovery story. You know, I went
to Harvard University and did a talk there, and I
did one in Fishmonger's Hall with Carla Bryant who's just
retired from Seafas. Barridese was there and Tim Oliver.
Speaker 1: And all the rest of it.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm going to tell you something now which is
probably just I'm going to leave it as a statement
that I think you probably need to read Fishing News
next week and there will be something related to me
in it.
Speaker 1: Oh, good stories here. One of the things I was
going to say to you as well, Colin, is that
Brace Stewart or podcast that was released is ninety three.
Speaker 2: Now eighty nine. Is a guy I've talked about, Richard Page.
Speaker 1: He's American, but he's out in China, and what a
fascinate in story. And the reason I'm telling you is
that there might be well, I would say there almost
will be something of interest for SGB because he talks
about two things that he's been involved with.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: One they were building at the side of a river,
so to make sure that it wasn't too much subsidence
and the water that we denote they used to make
sure that secured the building muscles right wow, And he
says there was a glue. They give us a sort
of glue effect. And then he goes on and tells
about a situation out in China there and there's a
bay like a sea, and after the war there was
paper mills something like that, and there was an enormous
problem with pollution in the sea. They cleared it. And
you know what was used to clear the pollution in
the sea oysters oysters And they call it the Great
Wall of Oysters. And he goes on in the podcast
to explain how they had five five or six different
levels and one was filtering the water, one was absorbing
the bacteria, and he goes through how it filtering and
the process. Not it's not sensationalism. The point is making
that he feels that and what I thought was interesting.
We're always suspicious of China, and we always whatever we
think that their ulterior motives, and that after listening to
some of what he was in, I think we could
learn from them.
Speaker 2: Call or Oh.
Speaker 3: I think I think there's lots of things that are
going on in China that that is true. I saw
recently somewhere I can't think where it was. I think
it was somewhere in the in obviously I was on
my mobile phone somewhere. But they now have in some
of these huge high rise blocks in some of the
more the most modern Chinese cities, they have hanging gardens
around the outside of the building with with you know,
which are producing sort of or homes for plants of
one sort or another, which are doing the right thing
for air pollution and things of that nature. So I
think there's a lot of ecological stuff going on. In
addition obviously they're pumping out.
Speaker 1: Well, that was episode in name with Richard, and then
after that, I can't remember, it's ninety one or two,
Richard came back needed a we both we did a
podcast and a guy joined as Greg Mercer. His name
is from the Maritime States, right, So the podcast there
covered the Canadian side the Chinese saide, and it was
fascinating and taking it together. Now, Greg Mercer is a
guy who has written a book called The Lobster Trap.
And one of the things I find, I think it's
really intriguing and fascinate And Colin, do you know, I
haven't written a book, but I often think how people
arrive at the title when they're writing a book. And
what I thought was fascinating about the Griggs book The
Lobster Trap. You're not long into the book until you
realize everybody involved is in the trap.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's oh bunderful title. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I never really sat down and wrote a chronology in
my career, and I've got lots of diaries of course
that are stashed away somewhere, but I mean it would
take hours to go through that. But I mean I've
covered a lot of the items that I was personally
very involved in and you can tell where my heart
is in so many ways. It's funny though that.
Speaker 2: I you will.
Speaker 3: Have noticed I think that there are certain memory lapses now.
It is kind of annoying because I've always had an
elephantine memory, and in a sense, all of these incidents
are still there, but you know, the names associated with
them may have gone or whatever. And it's I wouldn't
think even attempt to write a book now, although ironically
I used to write poetry. And in fact I was
just going through my cupboard in order to get this
computer out because I used my filing cupboard. Here I
found by accident something I put into one of the
pockets of the filing cabinet, which is a medal that
I got in nineteen sixty four for poetry at the
University of Breading, where I I won a prize for
English verse of all things, And you know, and I
do sketching. I do my Christmas card every year. Usually
sometimes it's a photograph, but usually.
Speaker 2: It's a drawing.
Speaker 3: And so there is another side to me which is
memory proofed. But a lot of the stuff I talk
about here and it's not just me, you know, I
had team. I had a team around me, and I
would like that to be clear in the podcast that
I'm used. I'm talking about issues very intimately associated with
and led on many of them. But I did have
an excellent supporting team, and you know, you can't mention
them all by name. The new lady who's running the
shellfish team at Seafast now has a list of the
publications that we produced in the scientific literature. A lot
of what we did was advice notes to London, and
of course, you know, a they were sort of semi
confidential at the time and all that. I'll tell you
one funny story now before I sign off, if I may.
You know, all this business about what you might call
politicians being bought by various people, you know, even the
Epstein Mandelssohn thing or whatever, it's anathema to me. My
training as a civil servant, dating from the sixties is
that you couldn't accept gifts if it looked in any
shape or form, as if that was associated with giving
advice that was user friendly.
Speaker 1: We were independent.
Speaker 3: I don't have one left now, but the first book
that I was given, I mean when I joined the lab,
they said go to the store, get a notebook and
a rubber because the rubbers are in short supply and
we keep them under lock and key, and the book
had hmso for the public service. And I've never lost
that ethos. Yeah, And it's funny because things are so
different now. The sorts of things that are being revealed
on a semi daily basis, particularly in relation to certain
members of the alleged hierarchy of the of the past,
are unthinkable to to many of us because it just
wasn't like that. You were you were, you were in
the truth game. And I well, one time, when I
was doing the fish work, I was involved in advice
in relation to macerel box down in the Southwest, and
we came to some decision about that in ceafas and
we advised London accordingly, and then some decisions were taken.
Speaker 1: The details.
Speaker 3: Are not particularly relevant really, but it was about either
the duration or the size of the box, that sort
of thing. And at a certain moment subsequent to the
decision being taken and described in Fishing News, a little
envelope arrived in my intro and it was a certain
gentleman in a certain location who was affected by the
macrol box and it contained a ticket for a football
match in a certain Southwestern town, and this was a
gesture of thanks for taking an objective view of the topic,
and very flattering though it was. My first action was
to write to him and say, I'm sorry, I I
although this is a relatively small thing, I can't accept
it because you know, it's just not done in a way.
And that might have been what might be considered by
my ball best to have been an extreme Presbyterian.
Speaker 2: View of the situation, but.
Speaker 3: It was how we lived at that time.
Speaker 1: Well a similarly in Colin on the say that I
would say when I say, say the sade of the
industry I was on when I was on the shore
base and trading, I'll never forget. It'll be the eighties,
back in the eighties. I'm sitting in the accountant's office
reviewing IF some figures and my manager called me my
phone mobile and now he was telling me that we
had taken load a few loads of redfish from Fiue's
boat sent them to bremer Harven, and he had just
got news from Bremerhaven that there was a problem. It
was this particular redfish which it was a Sebastos may
Mantella and there was coming through the flesh and they
couldn't use part of it, and it was we were
down quite a substanial and absolutely on the deal obviously
I counted maybe so my face drop when I was told.
And when I come off the phone, he says, oh,
what happened there? So I told him and he says,
but you know, he says, you're not liable. It says
there's nothing in the rating. You don't and it's much
deeper than that, that is your rate of nothing in
the rating.
Speaker 2: But I've given my word.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, and that's what we've felt. That went further
than your your signature.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm, mm hmm.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that you know there's there are all
sorts of things. I mean, what you know that there's
quite clearly more cases of lobster scrubbing and various other
things appearing from time to time in fishing news and
other aspects of certain us some downsize on the industry.
But that's a tiny percentage really that we hear about
of the total industry. And I don't know that. And
I had experiences in Bridlington where you know, a local
trouble maker would be sorted out by some of the
other compatriots of the industry. No names, no pack drill,
no written record, but the guy would be told, in
no uncertain terms, don't you shoot your pots over mine
or whatever it might be. And you know, scrubbing lobsters.
It happens, There's no question about it. And there are
some bad apples here and there, and we see about
them and we hear about them, But by and large,
I've always felt that the potting industry in particular were
pretty straightforward people. A lot of them come from long
established families, like the Cornish crawlfish fishermen, for example. There's
some really wise people who have been trying to spin
that fishery out as best they can and persuade the
MMO to you know, have a good off season and
this kind of thing. You know that their hearts are
in the right place. And I've always felt that one
of the things that the SAGB can do is to
push for conservation, but take into account that we are
dealing with people's livelihoods. But the one thing that I
also feel is that your livelihood still depends on sustainable
harvesting practices, sustainable harvesting policies and following the regulations, if
those regulations have been brought in for honest and good
and necessary scientific really since yeah, well, it's it's been
a pleasure to talk with you, Jim.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: I just wish that in some ways that you were
just down the road because we could have had a
few points together.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll maybe make that happen one day