Has Brexit sparked a new CODWAR?
Scots fishermen are being bullied out of their own waters – by what they say is a ruthless new breed of EU ‘pirate’ boats
JAMES Anderson was catching some shuteye below deck when his watchman burst in and raised the alarm: they were under attack. Thirty miles north-west of Shetland, a vessel with a German flag was sailing perilously close and its crewmen were trying to foul the propeller of Mr Anderson’s boat, the Alison Kay, with a rope.
Had they managed to do so the Scots would have been immobilised. And, had Mr Anderson not thrown his boat out of gear to avoid collision, it could have sunk.
Looking out over the bow, he could see the foreign vessel’s crew heavily outnumbered his own. On this occasion, he retreated.
This was not some naval skirmish from the war years – although the conflict on the high seas off Scotland is real enough.
This was a battle of wills between two fishing boat skippers. One of them, a Shetlander, has fished those waters since he first went to sea, aged 16.
The other one, most likely a Spaniard, is a newcomer. Yet, through his reckless act of aggression, he won.
Rather than risk his life and those of his five crew, Mr Anderson ordered his men to haul in his nets and back away. As they did so, the men on board the Pesorsa Dos cheered and taunted them. ‘These are our waters now,’ they seemed to say. ‘Find somewhere else.’
Mr Anderson may have lost that battle one year ago. But he expected to win the war. Brexit, surely, would see to that.
For almost a decade the fishing grounds off his home port of Lerwick had been invaded by rising numbers of boats from a thousand miles away or more – vessels with French or Spanish crews using radically different methods from Scottish trawlers to land their catch.
These foreign nationals are gill net fishermen who drape vast curtains of vertical netting into the depths. They leave them there for up to 48 hours at a time, snaring hake or monkfish by the thousand and commandeering stretches of water a mile wide and up to 15 miles long per boat.
They protect their network of mesh as a spider might its web, and chase away any threat. They see Scottish trawlermen, who tow a net behind them, as just such a threat – what if they plough through their gill nets? So they urge them to leave.
The alarming experience of Mr Anderson and his crew is an example of the shape these urgings take.
Little wonder trawlermen such as he were anxious to know what protections their fishing grounds would win under Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal as Britain prepared to leave the EU at the end of 2020. The answer is virtually none.
THE promise Brexit held of securing British waters for British fishermen has proved a pipe dream. If anything, say some trawlermen, foreign vessels are more bullish now about fishing these waters in the post-Brexit era than they were before.
‘We should have been the same as any other independent state in the world where you have control of your own waters,’ says Mr Anderson. Instead, he says, these rights were traded away.
The upshot is fishing in waters more than 12 miles off the UK coast is a virtual freefor-all, with several EU nations’ vessels allowed to operate there. And, as they fight over the same fish in the same waters – using mutually incompatible gear – tensions are escalating.
Late last month, 40 miles north-west of the Butt of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, skipper Ian Mackay was bullied off his usual fishing grounds by a group of 120ft gill net vessels, each twice the size of his boat, the Loch Inchard, registered in Kinlochbervie, Sutherland.
The skipper of the Loch Inchard said: ‘I have fished these grounds for 35 years and they were always productive.
‘On arrival, we noticed a large number of French and UKflagged vessels on the grounds and they immediately began screaming at us over the VHF that they had gear shot all over the surrounding area and we should leave and not attempt to trawl there.
‘After a long, heated discussion with them, we came to an agreement that they would stay north of our tows and they would clear their gear from the area in 24 hours.
‘We towed our way back to the grounds 24 hours later and six boats, French and UKflagged Spanish vessels, were four miles further onto our towing grounds than the previous day.
‘Immediately three of them started circling us at a very close distance before the French-flagged Sylvanna started heading straight for us. He passed so close to our bow I had to take the boat out of gear [or else] he would have rammed straight into us.’
Mr MacKay added: ‘Loch Inchard is an 18-metre wooden boat, they were a 36-metre steel boat and he put the lives of my crew and myself in jeopardy by his actions.
‘We eventually had to leave the area because of the threat of further action by them and finish our trip on less productive grounds.’
The flags are significant. Spanish vessels flying UK flags denote that their owners are operating under quotas – which regulate the numbers of each species of fish they can catch – allocated to Britain.
French-flagged vessels are operating from France’s quota allocation while the Germanflagged Pesorsa Dos, which Shetland skipper Mr Anderson encountered last year, is Spanish-owned but operating from Germany’s quota.
According to Mr Anderson, the encroachment of the foreign vessels on British waters more than 12 miles offshore is a direct consequence of the perceived ‘weakness’ of the UK fleet. Vessel numbers have been depleted year on year as EU quota cuts – designed to
preserved fish stocks – have made trawling for white fish such as cod, haddock, hake and monkfish less profitable.
Mr Anderson says of his foreign competitors: ‘You used to see them out in the deeper water, they never came in where we were fishing.
‘But then, after decommissioning when the fleet got a bit weaker, they started to move in. This last year especially was really bad. They came in and just completely covered the area where we fish.
‘They’re mainly Spanish, but French too. They may be flagged as UK or Germany. They can’t be flagged as Spain because Spain doesn’t have the right to fish in the North Sea.
‘So they use these flags of convenience, basically, to say they’re a UK vessel or a German vessel, which is allowed to fish there, but the crew are Spanish and all the profit will go back to Spain, so there’s no economic gain to Shetland.’
And so, day by day, the territorial disputes play out, resulting in intimidatory tactics some fear could lead to a sinking and fatalities. But livelihoods are at stake as well as lives. Those – and a burning sense of injustice – keep Scottish trawlers returning to waters they see as their own.
SAYS Mr Anderson: ‘When you get these boats coming in and taking over the whole of the best fishing grounds where we traditionally worked, then there’s no way we can move over. We have to say “no, we’re fishing here too”. You have to stand your ground.
‘We’re only fishing the same areas the boats were built to fish. We need to fish them to make them pay. We can’t be shoved off by a vessel that has no economic link or history of fishing the area. It’s just not going to happen.’
He posits a scenario whereby trawlers from the north of Scotland suddenly rocked up in the Bay of Biscay off France or in the waters off Bilbao in northern Spain and told local fishermen to sling their hooks.
‘If we went off the coast of Spain and told the boats from Bilbao or wherever “you’re not fishing here, we’re here now,” we’d be sunk. I don’t think we’d last a week. They’re trying to find new fisheries and that’s not our problem. They’ll have to find something else.’
The problem is the Brexit deal does not return our waters to British control as fishing communities were led to believe it would.
Under the trade and co-operation agreement struck on Christmas Eve, UK vessels are given a greater share of the quotas of fish caught in UK waters, amounting to a 25 per cent transfer of the value of EU boats’ fishing rights to the UK fleet over the next five years.
That still means foreign vessels are free to fish UK waters under their own nation’s quota allocations – or under Britain’s if they are UK-flagged. Those operating in the Bristol Channel and English Channel between six and 12 miles off the UK mainland can also continue to do so providing they can prove they had previously operated in those waters.
Outside that 12-mile limit, Spanish vessels can operate quite legally in Britain’s western waters, while our North Sea waters are fair game for several EU countries.
As a former skipper himself, Scottish White Fish Producers Association boss Mike Park sympathises with trawlermen who were led to believe foreign vessels’ fishing opportunities would be massively reduced in UK waters.
‘That was the narrative of the government at the time,’ he says. ‘There was an understanding... that far fewer vessels would be entering the area than before.’
But at the heart of the dispute, he says, is incompatible fishing methods which preclude Scottish and foreign vessels from operating in the same area. The tension is exacerbated by the language barrier and what he calls the ‘more anarchic’ behaviour of fleets such as the French, which is ‘part of their DNA’.
There are sound economic reasons for foreign fleets moving further north. A flesh-eating parasitic worm, Anisakis, is causing disease in fish in their traditional grounds, with the result that boats are getting a poorer price for them.
And, while it may seem egregious to muscle in on another fleet’s territory, foreign skippers are not exactly the type to fret about stepping on toes.
‘Fishermen are natural alpha males,’ says Mr Park. ‘Normally they don’t bind into the collective good. It’s about what I can catch and what I can make out of what I catch. The skipper/owner will be on a percentage for how much fish he lands and how much money the vessel makes.’
BUT it is not alpha-male behaviour that Scottish skippers say they are witnessing. It is conduct they describe as more like piracy.
‘At the end of the day, if they enter into behaviour that threatens life at sea, whether they are French or not, that is distinctly against the law,’ says Mr Park.
He also wants to see greater scrutiny of fish from UK waters being landed and transported to France and Spain. Suspicions are widespread that the numbers are far higher than those declared.
He says tougher conditions should also be imposed on licences to fish in UK waters, such as forfeiture of fishing rights for those breaking the rules.
But the fishermen’s gripe is not simply about rule-breaking.
‘I guess the Government has a problem,’ says Mr Park, ‘because it boils down to the fact that those vessels are allowed to fish here. Indeed, they don’t have to move when another vessel says “I prefer that bit, please get out”. That’s where the conflict then arises.’
For now, the Pesorsa Dos continues to operate with impunity in UK waters despite full written reports and video evidence of its crew’s behaviour being submitted to Marine Scotland, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and the German authorities.
The agencies said they were unable to investigate because the incident was outside their 12-mile jurisdiction, and ‘the Germans basically didn’t want to know,’ said Alison Kay skipper Mr Anderson. ‘Too much hassle. So he didn’t get any punishment at all. They’re emboldened, they’ve got a foothold.’
Brexit was supposed to return control to British waters. Are they, on the contrary, slipping out of control? And, in the trawlermen’s already perilous calling, what might the price be in lives?