Let them eat hake

Hake is increasingly the catch of the day in Cornwall. Mike Warner brings in the nets

Britain’s historically rich fishing seas have endured much scrutiny over time, with pressure on fleets to conserve stocks and lay the ghosts of overfishing to rest after our whitefish staples of cod, haddock, coley and hake hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Happily, through determination to show that wild-fish stocks can be successfully harvested at Maximum sustainable Yield— when the ‘recruitment’ of the population exceeds ‘mortality’—many of the species in our mixed fisheries are commercially viable again, with an abundance not seen in a generation.

‘Weight for weight, we now sell more hake than cod’

in the West Country, the talisman for this conservation effort is the hake (Merluccius merluccius), a voracious hunter and consumer of every species (including its own) that passes its fearsome gape. Exported en masse with a fraction of the catch remaining in the Uk—it’s traditionally much prized on Galician market stalls and the tables of andalucia—its fortunes are changing.

the Cornish port of newlyn boasts a fleet of 12 ‘gill netters’ that regularly go out in pursuit of this gadoid. Often converted scottish trawlers, they follow the shoaling masses over a 200-mile stretch of the Celtic sea, from west of the scillies to the edge of the continental shelf. ‘tiers’ of static (anchored) nets are stretched across the banks and contours that define the seabed, hanging like mesh