Sea sentries wait for fish to return
I HAVE a memory from many years ago of feeling a sickening jolt at the sight of a fishing boat bottom-trawling in a small bay in the west of Ireland. The vessel’s arrival at such a fairly remote place seemed as unexpected as the appearance of a galleon.
It went about its business dredging the area of sea trout, sand-eels, crabs, winkles and estuarine mud, spilled out on deck and then unceremoniously dumped having been filtered of edible sea creatures.
To me all this was a brazen act of smash-and-grab and it was not easy to explain it away to small boys who, each morning, left a holiday cottage to cast their lines in the incoming tide hoping for a bite or two.
Trawler bottom-scraping and denuding of Irish inshore waters have become common-place over time with few coastal fish or hitand-miss migrant shoals of mackerel. The odd craft seen close to shore today are usually dredging for razor clams, for which there is a market but were once of little interest — except to eccentric shellfish seekers who could be seen walking backwards at tide edge plunging hooked wires into sand bubbles.
A Connemara man said one had to whistle to draw up the razors which had propelled themselves downwards by a ‘foot’ appendage. There is an export trade in the rubbery fish used in chowders and stews.
Dredging inshore waters is contentious, of concern to environmentalists and can sometimes lead to confrontations. One Italian fisherman/restaurant owner has generated publicity for a forceful approach to the bottom-scrapers — he dumped hundreds of concrete blocks in the sea near his village to halt their activities and, after much “tumulto”, followed this with blocks of marble, with carvings by artists, transported off the Tuscan coast at a place called Talamone.
Paolo Fanciulli, or Paolo the Fisherman, has dropped his submerged sentries 25ft below the surface in a campaign of eco-vigilantism.
Shoals of fish have returned to explore his underwater museum of marble gifted by a local quarry. Coral and plant life are now cover for yellow-streaked salpa, striped red mullet, sea bream, triggerfish and shellfish.
A local man who owned a marble quarry donated 100 blocks of marble — and Paolo invited sculptors to work on them. One was British artist, Emily Young, who carved a ‘weeping guardian’ face. He has managed to finance his project with government support and donations.