Scots family businesses facing ruin ... because a faceless charity has ordered shellfish off the menu
Struggling fishermen hit by new body blow as red tape rules out crab and lobster
it be a dogfish, starfish, everything goes back alive.’ The same cannot be said for trawlers, whose crews, much to their chagrin, can find themselves throwing back dead the fish they cannot land without breaking quota regulations.
Having previously worked as a tower crane driver in the construction industry, Mr Pearson joined his father in the lobster fishing business almost 20 years ago.
‘He taught me everything I know about fishing,’ he says. ‘I wish I had done it a lot earlier.’
For several years they were a team and, by the time of James Pearson’s death ten years ago, the hard-won knowledge of the sea, their catch and keeping it viable had passed from father to son.
It involved sacrifice in time and energy. Lobster fishing in the summer is a seven-days-a-week job. It is tide-dependent, which means 4am starts are common. In the winter, when the creatures retreat to deeper waters, it means ‘picking away’, making do with less.
Along with those practicalities, a good deal of the lore and superstitions of seafaring has passed down too. You never whistle on a boat. ‘It’s called whistling up the wind,’ says Mr Pearson. ‘And I always chuck a couple of handfuls of coins in the harbour to give something back to the sea.’
Only a few dozen creels stay in the water in the lean months and the focus of the business turns to repairing the traps and servicing the 23ft fishing boat which is the family workhorse in the summer.
High seas can make outings impossible in the early part of the year. Storms can lift creels off the seabed and dash them against rocks on the shore or dump them, broken, on beaches. It is in late spring that Mr Pearson falls back in love with his job again.
‘In the summertime we can be out leaving the harbour at quarter to four, four o’clock in the morning and fishing for between six and eight hours depending on how many creels we’ve got in the water that day and what time we need to get back in for the tide,’ he says.
Mistime it, and he and his nephew Ryan, who is helping on the boat this year, have to take an inflatable dinghy to shore.
Yet, he says: ‘It’s the best job in the world in the summer; the sunrises are amazing. You are your own boss, there is nobody around you and it is the best office in the world. I love it.’ His fishing grounds are some three to five miles west of the harbour and the same distance east: ‘We are classed as an inshore boat because we are as close to the shore, sometimes, as we can get.’
Almost inevitably, that can sometimes mean too close. In 2020 Windward was stuck on rocks as the tide went out. ‘I could literally walk to the shore.’
During these summer months, up to 20 ‘fleets’ of creels, varying in length from five traps to 13, are laid and serviced daily.
Before lockdown, a string of merchants were on hand to buy his product but, as restaurants were forced to close, demand evaporated. At the time, Mr Pearson’s partner, Gemma, was heavily pregnant with his youngest, Molly, and a sense of dread gripped the family. ‘I thought, “What are we going to do? How are we going feed the baby?”’
He adds: ‘We looked at all the government grants, but we weren’t eligible for any of them. We were just left on the tide line to fend for ourselves.’
The answer was the Lobster Man, a business that began life as a Facebook advert reading ‘Live lobsters, can deliver’ and soon morphed into a catering trailer at Fenton Barns, near North Berwick.
A loyal customer base developed and, two years on, Mr Pearson and his partner have planning permission to launch their own restaurant. The sweeping statement from the MCS that lobster is ‘fish to avoid’, therefore, could hardly be less welcome.
The most egregious injustice, perhaps, is it tars an entire industry with one brush, ignoring the efforts of fishermen such as Mr Pearson to ensure sustainability.
‘Just left on the tide line to fend for ourselves’
He says he is well aware of the minority who worry rather less about conservation of the species which provides their livelihoods. ‘There are always the ones who spoil it for everyone else,’ he adds.
And so the 300-year family business may be caught between a rock and a hard place – between a strident charity with an instinctive distrust of mobile fishing and reckless operators who risk heaping opprobrium on the industry through overfishing. It is a problem faced not only by those who strive to fish sustainably for lobster, but for every species namechecked on the MCS blacklist.
Elspeth Macdonald, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, said the MCS guide was ‘what we have come to expect from an organisation that would prefer that wild capture fishing didn’t exist, and campaigns endlessly to end what is a legitimate and highly regulated means of food production.’
She added: ‘I think it’s fair to say that fishermen were enraged when they saw some of the ratings that came out last week. It is really evident when you are involved in the fishing industry or immerse yourself at all in fishing communities that these people are in it for generations, you know? It’s not an industry that people whizz in and out of to make a fast buck.’
Asleep in his boat-shaped bed, toy creel by his side as his father heads for the harbour before first light, Ford Pearson may dream of one day skippering the Windward. But the future is stormy, the handing over of the family flame far from guaranteed.
FOR more than 300 years Stewart Pearson’s family has eked out a modest living from the waters not far from his doorstep where the Firth of Forth meets the North Sea. In generations gone by, they brought home herring; this last century or so it has been mainly lobster – a highly specialised form of fishing which Mr Pearson learned from his father, James.
‘Picking away’ James Pearson used to call it when, in the lean winter months, he might land only a dozen lobsters in a day. He likely first heard the expression from his own father.
One day, perhaps, Stewart Pearson’s son, Ford, will be a lobster fisherman too. The interest is already there. The four-year-old sleeps in a bed shaped like a boat, with a miniature creel lying next to him.
‘He’s absolutely crazy for fishing,’ chuckles his father, clearly delighted by the encouraging early signs that the torch may one day pass safely to the next generation.
The 47-year-old from North Berwick has had to fight hard to ensure the family legacy did not fizzle out on his watch. In the past two years alone there has been lockdown and the loss, virtually overnight, of buyers for his product.
Brexit brought a further downturn as red tape threatened to strangle the export market for fresh Scottish seafood. Storms kept Mr Pearson’s boat tied up for six weeks this year – and spiralling fuel and living costs are gnawing at his margins.
Only through hard work and enterprise have he and his family managed to keep things afloat. But now a new threat looms on the horizon – one he sees as a grievous injustice.
Lobster caught in the wild in Scottish waters is a ‘fish to avoid’ states the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) baldly in its latest Good Fish Guide. Whether it is landed on the East Coast or the West Coast, we should not eat it. The highly influential charity also takes the red pen to brown crab – another key product for Mr Pearson – and a raft of other species including skate and monkfish, the latter a cornerstone of many high-end restaurant menus.
Two reasons are given for avoiding lobster which is caught using the traditional method of baited creels and goes back generations in Mr Pearson’s family. The first is concern for stocks – or the ‘biomass’ – of lobsters in Scottish waters. In short, nobody seems to know how many there are. As the Good Fish Guide puts it: ‘There is no data available to indicate biomass. Therefore, there is concern for the biomass.’
The second reason is these creels may result in entanglement of minke whales. In all his fishing days Mr Pearson has never known a minke whale to become snagged in a lobster creel in waters near him. He fishes close to the shore – sometimes yards away. Not many passing minkes there.
More broadly, the UK public body Seafish points to scientific evidence suggesting entanglements of minke whales in traps laid in Scottish waters for lobster and crab is an extremely rare event, likely affecting 0.017 per cent of the North Atlantic population of the species annually.
In the circumstances, might the removal of Scottish lobster from menus seem a trifle disproportionate? For a man whose living and reputation are both staked on the sustainable fishing of the species, it is more than that. It is, he says, ‘actually quite disgusting’.
In the face of the existential threat lockdown presented to his livelihood, Mr Pearson launched his own business, the Lobster Man, selling the cooked delicacy direct to the public.
He completed a course and earned a chef qualification to allow him to do so. Now, on the basis of evidence the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation describes as ‘cherry-picked to suit their narrative’, the MCS says Scottish lobster should not pass our lips.
‘It makes me very angry,’ says Mr Pearson. ‘Hundreds of small fishing businesses round the coast of Scotland will be affected if this scaremongering continues. Scottish shellfish is renowned worldwide for its freshness and taste.’
From his earliest days accompanying his father on fishing outings, sustainability has been integral to the family ethos. It applies to the Pearson tradition of building and mending creels by hand – and above all to the practice of ‘giving the ground a rest’ rather than plundering stocks in the same patch of seabed.
On hauling the creels aboard his boat, Windward, and emptying the catch, he says, ‘we turn around and find another spot. I’ve always been taught to fish sustainably, so we move a little bit away and put them down somewhere else so that we’re not just hammering the same patch of ground all the time and scooping up every lobster available.’
A key item of equipment on board is the gauge that measures every lobster he catches. Anything less than 87 millimetres (almost 3.5in) from behind the eye to the end of the body shell is thrown back alive where it was caught – as is everything which is not a lobster or a crab.
‘I’ve got records going back to my dad and my grandad and what they were catching on a regular basis, pretty much daily, and I’m matching that. It’s been kept sustainable for that reason and because we are one of the friendliest types of fishing.
‘Any by-catch always goes back alive. We hand pick everything out of the creels and put it back – whether
‘Hundreds of small businesses will be affected’