The truth about gill-nets....

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The truth about gill-nets....

Postby x » Sun Sep 03, 2006 7:14 pm

Gill-netting(1), or it?s close relatives, tangle (2), trammel(3) and drift(4) netting, is not a new phenomenon, by any standards. DuPont made public in 1938 that their company had invented nylon. In the 1960?s, it began to be used for nets. However, it was not until about the early 1980?s with the advent of cheap, mass produced nylon netting that gillnetting exploded in popularity as a commercial fishing method. Prior to this, nets were made from natural fibres and were much heavier, bulkier and required a lot more maintenance. But with cheap monofilament and multi-monofilament nets, the gear became almost disposable.

Of course, other technologies were emerging and developing which greatly assisted the gill-net fisheries. Advances in echo-sounding, which had begun with basic depth finders, had evolved to paper charts showing the bottom below. The Decca navigation system, requiring its own specialised paper charts, was giving way to the more accurate Loran-C
System, which was soon superseded by GPS and later DGPS. Hydraulic net haulers, pioneered mostly around the Baltic, soon allowed the gill-netters to work greater and greater depths in increasingly rough weather and seas.

By unhappy coincidence, around the time that gill-netting became cheap and easy to work, various decommissioning schemes in the UK flooded Irish ports with cheap second-hand wooden trawlers ? mostly in the 50-70 foot range, which were easily adapted for gill netting.

The initial target of these boats was mostly cod and haddock, with ling, pollock and coaley plus various skates, rays and sharks making a useful by-catch. So good was this fishery, that fleets of boats would follow the cod stocks all the way from north Donegal right down the west coast, temporarily basing themselves in Killala, noted for its cod fishery, Carigaholt, Fenit, Rossaveal, all the way to Dingle.

Later, emulating our French and Spanish neighbours, a winter deep-water hake fishery on the edge of the continental shelf was developed which lasted for some years.

Eventually, a market opened up for spurdog, until then seen as a nuisance by-catch with no market value. Previously hated due to the damage to nets caused in removing them, the dogfish were now the cash crop and were landed in droves. While the dogfish soon wore out the nets with their abrasive skin, the benefits outweighed the cost of replacing the netting. Indeed, a common practice was to take the salmon nets from the previous year and strip and re-mount these on head and footlines suitable for working on the bottom.

However, such was the fishing effort directed at the spurdog that soon, too, that fishery showed signs of decline. Boats had to travel further and work ever deeper waters, necessitating the deployment of ever more powerful net haulers. Heavier footropes and more buoyant headlines were needed to keep the nets fishing in strong currents ? otherwise for a portion of the tide when the run was the strongest and fish movement the greatest, the nets were blown flat on the bottom and fished poorly.

Eventually and predictably, near-shore gill-netting died a death, victim of it?s own success and the greed of fishermen; none of whom, it appeared, saw a warning in landing box after box of spurdog on a pier covered with embryonic fish and their yolk sacs. The gulls ate well though, squealing and crapping on everything below. It didn?t bother the fishermen, most of whom kept their oilskin hoods up to foil the attempts of the social welfare officers to video them ?doing the double?.

Eventually, when the tired old ex-decomissioned boats could no longer travel the distances out to sea required to make a living, everything inshore having been fished below a profitable level, gill-netting came almost to halt. Many of the boats for a time switched to crabbing until this, too, eventually became unprofitable. Then they were sold on again.
New purpose built crabbers with vivier systems were becoming more popular and of course, the pelagic fisheries, previously the domain of wooden trawlers, was being taken over by the larger steel tank boats.

However, there was still a fishing to be made far to the west. Foreign boats had been working this vast fishing ground for years, using gill and tangle-nets for various species. However, this gill-net fishery was different.

While the original inshore fishery worked on the basis of setting and hauling their nets almost daily, weather permitting, and landing the catch on a daily basis, the deep water gill-net fishery was prosecuted in a much different fashion.

Continental boats from as far away as Portugal would make the long steam to west of Ireland ? all the way from the Porcupine bank at the southern end to Rockall and Hatton at the North, there to set their nets in search mostly of monkfish, red crabs, leafscale gulper sharks, kitefin sharks, spurdog, gulper shark and portugese shark, hake and ling, among others. Trips to the fishing grounds for these boats were typically anything from a week to perhaps ten days. Once on the fishing grounds, they might remain there for anything up to three months, freezing their catch before making the long steam back home. If a fisherman was lucky, he might have up to ten days ashore before his next trip.

Holds bulging with their catch, there would be no room to take the gear home, so it was left in the water for weeks at a time until the boat retuned to the grounds. Lying in depths of down to perhaps 1200m or more, surface weather posed little danger to the gear itself, apart from perhaps tearing off the markers. However, gear was lost for a variety of reasons. Indeed, on average each boat was calculated to lose about a kilometre a day to various snags and obstructions and occasionally whole fleets of gear would be lost ? towed from it?s position by trawlers, not always unintentionally, if reports are to be believed, and for other reasons. Perhaps not surprising with nets left unattended for up to five weeks at a time and even when being worked actively, only hauled on average every 3-5 days. When you consider that each boat might be working between 150-250 miles of net, that?s a lot of net to get lost. Given the size of the fleet, estimates are that there would be a total of 3500-5500 miles of nets fishing continuously. Laid end to end, that would easily cross the North Atlantic. Picture that.....

To offset this problem, each boat, when leaving on a fishing trip would bring with it reams of new sheeting. Any net recovered in too poor a state to fish properly would be stripped off the ropes and remounted with the new sheeting on board as time permitted. Often boats worked two shifts, so spare hands were available to mend nets. The old netting would occasionally be burnt on board, but more commonly simply tossed overboard though in some cases efforts were made to tie it into bales. Either way, net discarded or lost would end up ghost fishing on the sea bed.

[img]http://www.sacn-online.org/yarn.jpg[/img]

A number of studies have been conducted on how long a net might continue to fish unattended. Gear lost or discarded in depths over 400m may continue to fish for years as there is very little bio-fouling or water movement to either clog up the net until it sinks or to ball it up around some obstruction. In shallower waters, less than 200m, the nets tend to foul up or become trapped around obstructions and lose much of their ability to catch, but can remain about 30% efficient for some years after.

[img]http://www.sacn-online.org/ghost.jpg[/img]

As wasteful as ghost fishing is, it is not the only evil perpetrated by gill-netters. Given the extended soak time (the time between any given part of the fleet of nets being shot and hauled again), many of the fish so caught are unfit for human consumption due to decay or damage by the denizens of the deep and effectively becomes by-catch to be tossed overboard. Discard rates of between 50-70% have been documented. Anyone who has removed a whole fish from a net will know that it is difficult enough; trying to remove a broken fish is much more difficult and the solution is to nick a few meshes or in worse cases, cut the area around the fish out.

[img]http://www.sacn-online.org/rotting.jpg[/img]

Of course, this rapidly renders the net less than efficient, perhaps explaining the amount of netting that is cut down and dumped on a regular basis.

[img]http://www.sacn-online.org/mounting.jpg[/img]

In addition, many of the boats involved in this fishery, being so far beyond the normal patrol radius of any fisheries protection vessels and due to the practice of not taking the nets into port, are fishing with undersize mesh. Not only that, they often perform ?high-grading?, the practice of starting to keep all fish of legal minimum size at the start of the trip, dumping these as they can replace them with larger specimens later in the trip to ensure the best prices on landing.

[img]http://www.sacn-online.org/discard.jpg[/img]

The industry and indeed government is well aware that commercial deep water gill-net fisheries are disastrous in terms of the waste they create and the long-term problems associated with lost or discarded nets. In December of last year it was announced that
there was to be a ban on deep water gill-netting below 200m. All was apparently well until about July, when an exception was made for the hake gill-net fishery.

This whole ban has been challenged by the Spanish, predictably and recently, the French and Spanish have been caught at it again, this time under the guise of ?scientific gill-netting? with undersize mesh, a practice which, as you might expect, is about as sound as scientific whaling.

I think, seeing what I have of the inshore and deep water gill-net fisheries, that gill-netting should be banned altogether, everywhere. Many will advance the argument that gill nets are selective, don?t damage the ground and are a better alternative to trawling, which we know destroys the sea bed and takes a massive proportion of by-catch.

However, I am not resigned to accepting the lesser of two evils as my only alternative and will not fall into that particular trap. I would far rather see the practices of jigging and long-lining replace net fisheries altogether as these are infinitely less wasteful and much more environmentally friendly. Just so long as it?s done outside of a three mile limit, so us anglers can get a fair crack of the whip.

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[url=http://homepage.mac.com/mooncusser/gillnet1.mov]Gillnet in action (movie):[/url]

Notes

1. Gill nets are sometimes used from the shore but are, however, most commonly used from vessels at sea and are then marked by surface dhan buoys. Dhan buoys are laid at intervals but it is not always possible to see 2 buoys at once. It is therefore difficult to be sure of the direction in which the nets are set. The practice of surrounding wrecks - 'wreck-netting' is also increasingly prevalent, as is surrounding various underwater features known to aggregate fish.

2. Tangle nets are single walled nets used to catch species such as monkfish, turbot and ray and shellfish such as crab, lobster, crayfish etc. While they resemble gill nets in their design they have a greater amount of slack netting and less flotation at the headline and a smaller vertical height of netting. The result is a much more loosely hung net, which effectively entangles species with protruding spines, wings and fish such as monkfish, rays, skates, sharks etc which do not have gills of a structure or position which renders them susceptible to gilling.

3. Trammel nets are three walled nets which can be used to catch a much wider variety of species ranging from cod and monkfish to pollock, coaley and wrasse. The net consists of three walls of netting in which a small fine meshed inner net is sandwiched between two outer walls of larger mesh netting so that fish striking the net tend to ?bag? themselves in the sn]mall mesh trapped within the larger mesh.

4. Drift nets are generally used for pelagic and migratory species such as herring, mackerel, pilchards, sprats, bass, salmon and sea trout etc. they are normally rigged to form a curtain in the water and generally down-wind, with the vessel at the leeward end of the gear. The net is set out in a straight line and drifts with the current. Fish on passage swim into the net and are 'gilled'. Single sheets of net are usually 50 or 100 metres in length. Varying numbers are joined together to form a 'fleet' of nets. The length and depth of the nets can vary considerably depending on the target species.
x
 

:(

Postby John D » Mon Sep 04, 2006 12:59 pm

That's bloody frightening!

John D.
Protect the magical sport of sea angling and spread the word that conservation is the way forward. Put fish back!!!!
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Postby pete » Wed Sep 06, 2006 10:02 am

Interesting piece that
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Postby corbyeire » Wed Sep 06, 2006 11:26 am

very informative
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Postby Liamo » Fri Sep 15, 2006 12:49 pm

Great piece,

Well done, that is scary scary stuff. Sickening. Wouldn't it be lovely to see a one page article like this or similar in Irsih Angler every month? I've written to Sea Angler about this before but was just completely ignored.

I just don't get in we are anglers - we have a vested interest in conserving what little fish there are left. We fish for fun but what about all the tackle shops, tackle giants like Penn, Daiwa, Abu and all the angling mags. When the fish are finally wiped out and we've nothing left to fish for who's gonna buy their gear? The commercials might be wiping out our hobby but they are wiping out these peoples livelihoods and yet they don't seem to be doing anything either! You would think these guys would be at the forefront of pushing the conservation issue, they have even more of a vested interest in it than we do in many respects.

I just think that to push this out to a wider audience one of the Irish angling mags should publish just a one page article on fish conservation issues every month just to get the word out there and to get anglers awareness up even for game and coarse anglers who may not be aware of just how bad the situation is with our area of the sport.

Great piece and fair play sandman. You deserve a lot of credit with regards to the work you've put in on the conservation side of things on this site over the past 18 months. It may go unsaid but thank you and keep it up.

Liam
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Postby x » Fri Sep 15, 2006 6:47 pm

Thanks. While some of the information comes from personal experience, I scraped a lot of it from various online sources, some of them government reports. Andy and I do a lot of work on these sorts of articles and it does require quite a bit of research and writing. We do feel it's worth the effort if just one person reads it and comes away a bit better informed.

There's a lot goes on just over the horizon that the commercial fishing industry would prefer we remained in ignorance of - at least until all the fish were gone. Most people are blissfully unaware that a government subsidised, massive and vastly destructive and wasteful industry is running 3 shifts a day out there, almost every day of the year. I can assure you from personal experience, they're not out for a pleasure cruise either. It's a case of take as much as you can fit in, run for port, turn the boat round and get back out. They all know it's a case of get it before the next man does.

As regards tackle manufacturers and dealers, I don't think they feel that there's any threat to their business from dwindling fish stocks.

We're buying more kit, and dearer kit all the time, to try and ensure that we catch something. Hardly a crisis there then, if you are a tackle manufacturer or dealer. They've actually never had it so good. Most of that shiny and expensive kit in the tackle shops is now made in China for peanuts.

Sure, if the crunch came and anglers were blanking more often than not and drifting away from the sport, tackle sales were going down etc, then there would be an outcry from these guys. So long as the bottom line is healthy, they aren't going to lift a finger. I assume their business plan is to take their expertise in marketing and in carbon fibre manufacturing and make tennis rackets or something when angling bites the dust.

As far as I'm concerned, we won't want their help then. We need it now.
I guess the only help anglers are going to get, in this country anyway, is from anglers, which is why a few of us are joining SACN, doing surveys, forming specialist protection groups, writing articles like the above etc and plan to take whatever results and information we can and present it to anyone in any body that'll listen.

Maybe the Marine Institute, the CFB, Dept of Arts/Sport/Tourism, Dept of the Marine, a few politicians who have made positive noises the last time we contacted them and the occasional political party that has an angler-friendly platform.

Quite shortly, we'll be closing the SACN survey, starting to analyse the data, write a report and do some case studies. After that, it'll be time to start knocking on doors. Hopefully, the case we make for angling will be both convincing and representative of the views of the majority of anglers.
It'll certainly reflect the views and desires of those who have completed the survey, at any rate.

I guess if we're really lucky, we might just get something done that'll benefit us in years to come.
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