Environment and Heitage Service Sharks, rays and skate

Hi Folks, i am a regular reader of the posts on this forum but have had very little time to fish and have not posted any messages since i joined. I work for a fishery authority and have learned that there is a meeting this week, thursday night, 14 december, 7:30 in Portaferry being held by EHS biodiversity unit. It is aimed at recreational sea anglers and the organiser Gary Burrows is hoping that there will be a good attendance. There will, i think, be discussions on the species, their distributions and the possibility of setting up a recording programme and possibly tagging experiments to ascertain distribution and abundances for conservation of these species. I think there will be availability for 50 attendees. I am not sure of the location as yet but i can check this tomorrow, most likely it is in the Aquarium. Please circulate to all interested parties, it is about time sea anglers officially became the valuable recording tool that they currently are. This will only lead to better conservation strategies for these species and increased awareness of the value of recreational sea angling.

Thanks for the info. I won't make it but it would be great if you could post a report afterwards to let us know what happens ...

Thanks again.

I think this post should be in a more popular forum - mods?

I think this post should be in a more popular forum - mods?

Therein lies the problem Jude :)

shall be going along, might be interesting

.....possibly tagging experiments to ascertain distribution and abundances for conservation of these species.

Will the information gained from the tagging scheme be made available to commercial fishermen? Somebody from here that's present should ask.


cynical, moi? :?

Be nice if someone from the site attended. Any takers?

something that shall be ask without a doubt relating to any tagging programme

An interesting meeting last night , the talk by Ali Hood was very good, certainly opened my eyes on a few things

The discussion afterwards however was the most interesting part for me anyway.

One thing that stood out , more than anything was the question, who represents anglers ?
That got me thinking... who does speak for anglers at meetings like this . ?

The commercials are well organised and speak with one voice... but who represents anglers as a stakeholder , Recreational Sea Anglers spend a hell of a lot of money .... but they have no representation at marine stakeholder meetings.

Why ?


Andy

this was an excellent meeting in my opinion, with representation present from many experienced anglers with valuable information going both ways, im sure we will put up a wee report on it once we get more time to get it all down on paper.
many thanks to ali hood from shark trust for coming over to give us the seminar, it was very interesting

yeah, we had some guys there like ourselves who are prepared to put their spare time into taking concerns / worries / needs of recreational sea anglers to these government bodies, but problem is, we were not all under the one banner if you like.
therefore in situations like this IMHO we all need to be speaking as Sea Anglers Conservation Network, it like this, the more members we have, the stronger voice we have, so for all the minute it takes, i cannot encourage people enough to join the SACN....

yeah, we had some guys there like ourselves who are prepared to put their spare time into taking concerns / worries / needs of recreational sea anglers to these government bodies, but problem is, we were not all under the one banner if you like.
therefore in situations like this IMHO we all need to be speaking as Sea Anglers Conservation Network, it like this, the more members we have, the stronger voice we have, so for all the minute it takes, i cannot encourage people enough to join the SACN....

Hello Mate

Ahhh but ... Do we represent all the recreational Sea Anglers In Ireland ?
SACN Ireland has approx 40 members thats North and South
So the SACN cannot claim to represent all Anglers in Ireland

Lets take a look at the Alternatives
1. IFSA... fine if your a match fisherman. but dont have anything to do with recreational sea anglers
2.EFSA... same as IFSA
3. Dont care , just want to fish

The last point probably applies to the majority of people on this and other forums. In fact some are openly hostile to any form of conservation being discussed in public , some who write for the various angling mags could do a lot more to promote it but choose not to :roll:

So what is the way forward ?
And perhaps more importantly who will put the time and effort into it ?

Andy