HEALING THE SEA
The Isle of Arran’s seabed had been decimated by dredging, until the islanders’ campaign to protect Lamlash Bay restored life, says Richard Baynes.
Deeply damaged by overfishing, the seabed around the Isle of Arran was dying. To rescue their precious waters, the islanders campaigned for a fishing ban in Lamlash Bay – and witnessed an astonishing recovery.
Still wet with the water of Brodick Bay, diver Chris Rickard pulls cockle shells from a bag at his waist. The opening sides of the bulging bivalves are snapped off, as if cut with a chisel.
“The cockles feed on the seabed with just their tops showing and the dredger cracks the top off them,” he says. “They have no chance.”
The Community of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST) has enlisted Chris to inspect the impact on the seabed of a scallop dredger seen here, 100m from shore, two weeks earlier. As well as the shells, Chris has film showing characteristic ‘tram track’ dredge lines running through a bed of maerl – a delicate coral-like plant – that was already wrecked by previous dredging.
It’s this kind of damage that, thanks to COAST campaigning, led to the creation of a groundbreaking marine reserve just a few miles south of here – the Lamlash Bay No Take Zone (NTZ) – which was established 12 years ago.
That zone is now thriving, and the people behind it have inspired a broader movement for communities on Scotland’s huge coastline to take control of the seas and help revive them.
“The dredged areas were just sand and gravel. The complex seabed life had all gone”
In the 1980s, Howard Wood and friend Don MacNeish were regular divers around the bays of Arran. They enjoyed spectacular displays of sea life and could happily take home a bag of scallops or a flatfish for dinner, with no worries about the state of the sea. But in 1985, the long-standing ban on trawling on the seabed within three miles of the UK shore was lifted, after fishing industry lobbying.
Not long before that, a new device for catching scallops, the Newhaven dredger, had appeared in the local fishing fleet based on the nearby mainland. Where traditional dredgers could only reach a fraction of the rocky seabed, the springy tines of the new device could track over boulders “the size of a car”, says Howard – sucking up shellfish from almost anywhere.
“That’s the point when I really started seeing change,” says Howard. “You would go into a dredged area and it was just sand and gravel. The complex seabed life was all gone.”
Fish catches soared for a couple of years – then plummeted, as fishers legally pillaged stocks, and fish nurseries in complex, varied seabed were destroyed. More operators moved down the food chain to catch what survived – scallops and prawns.
Around this time, Don took a trip to New Zealand and visited a groundbreaking No
Take Zone, where all fishing was banned.
That experience sowed the seed for an almost 20-year campaign by Howard and Don to create the Lamlash Bay NTZ.
THE CAMPAIGN BEGINS
With no expertise in campaigning, Howard and Don set out to persuade politicians to take the idea of a No Take Zone on board, forming COAST in 1995. A crucial part of getting the people of Arran involved was showing them the riches around them.
“The big story of COAST is the years we spent giving talks, using my underwater films and
photography to persuade the locals that there is something worth preserving,” Howard says. “When they saw brilliant seabed life, they thought it was from the tropics – they couldn’t believe it was on their doorstep. People could see something worth saving.”
Slowly, the pair won residents over, and that resulted in backing from Members of the Scottish Parliament and councillors. The fact the two were locals was key: Don’s family goes back six generations on Arran, while plantnursery owner Howard, now 65, has lived there since he was 15.
The Clyde Fishermen’s Association (CFA) now claims that it helped establish the zone, but Howard recalls it differently. He says that despite initial interest from local fishermen, the fishing lobby opposed the NTZ.
Government agencies suggested a voluntary zone; Howard says that had been tried and failed elsewhere, so they pressed for a legally enforceable NTZ. That, in the end, was what they got: in 2008, the No Take Zone was finally designated by the Scottish Government.
PARADISE REGAINED
On a sunny, cool, wind-whipped day, Lamlash Bay has a crisp, salty beauty, with steep Holy Island sitting neatly within it. On the north shore, as the tide falls, rocks lie scattered in the mud, gentle waves lap and the rigging on beached sailing boats rattle in the wind. Beyond lie the wider Clyde and the low Ayrshire coast.
The NTZ covers just 2.7 square kilometres, a slim channel between this shore and Holy Island’s north end, chosen for its sheer variety of habitats. From the seabed, I can see to deep rocky reefs and a small untouched maerl bed.
Importantly, in 2016, the NTZ, COAST and community support for protecting the sea led to the South Arran Marine Protected Area being legally created, banning seabed trawling and dredging in waters right around the south of the island, and promoting sustainable fishing, such as creel fishing and hand-diving.
The NTZ and the area around it now show a remarkable revival: commercial species are thriving, with a rapid rise in scallop numbers. Don, now in his 70s, stepped back from COAST soon after the zone was established, but he and Howard went back last year for a dive. “Don could hardly believe it. There were scallops every couple of feet,” smiles Howard.
He emphasises that it’s still not perfect. “It’s an area of seabed that is coming back from a hard time. The importance is not that there’s a glittering array of life, it’s that it’s recovering and we can prove it.”
And it hasn’t been without hiccups; since the NTZ’s inception, Howard says there have been regular night incursions by unlit fishing vessels. The CFA says that has not been substantiated, and there have been no prosecutions, but Howard reports that in the past 18 months incidents have diminished – a sign, perhaps, that the fishing industry now appreciates the benefits the zone brings.
EXPANDING HORIZONS
Howard stepped back from chairing COAST in 2018, having been awarded an OBE and the prestigious international Goldman Award for grassroots environmental campaigners. Although both awards embarrassed him, he says he values them for boosting COAST.
But he is proud of helping to establish the Coastal Communities Network in Scotland, with 16 groups inspired by COAST springing up across the country, seeking an active role in how their seas are managed and protected. This in turn is driving the Scottish Government to take community views into account in its policy-making.
The organisation inspired and created by Howard and Don is not content to sit on its laurels. Back on the dive boat in Brodick Bay, new COAST chair Russell Cheshire says that Chris Rickard’s evidence will fuel the push by COAST for more marine protection outside the NTZ and MPAs.
“It’s about time the Scottish Government started looking at bringing back the three-mile limit, to include dredging as well,” he says.
“Do that and fish will come back, and that will help fishermen as well as the environment.”