Guy Grieve's plea for action to save the seabed from intensive fishing

Urgent action to protect the seabed around our coast is needed to ensure it is not entirely destroyed, says Guy Grieve

It is impossible for me to write a piece in this marinefocused issue without reiterating my thoughts on the very urgent need for protection of our seabeds. Before I start however, for those readers who aren’t already aware of them, I must declare my interests.

For the last ten years I have earned my living and supported my family entirely by diving for king scallops off the West Coast of Scotland. There’s no trust fund, no subsidies, no grants, no pension or sick pay. If my crew and I are lucky enough to find scallops then that’s good news. If not then we all get nervous.

My boat alone supports six children. Our form of fishing, along with other ‘static’ (as opposed to ‘mobile’ boats like trawlers and dredgers) forms of fishing such as creeling for lobster, langoustine and crab accounts for approximately 85% of the Scottish fleet by boat numbers and 70% of the fleet by direct employment. Crucially, it produces high value catches of Scotland’s precious shellfish stocks with a low environmental impact.

It seems incredibly obvious that no single person or group should have the right to enrich themselves whilst impoverishing what belongs to us all. For me that’s the key issue. But since the three-mile limit, which protected our inshore waters from the damaging effects of dredging and bottom trawling, was lifted in 1984, these forms of fishing have utterly degraded our inshore shallows. Employment opportunities have dwindled and in all areas fish stocks have plummeted to virtually nothing.

The most frustrating thing about this is that the catches from the mobile sector are being sold as a devalued product when compared to the high value of creel and dive landings. Yet the high value, low impact fishers (who are heavily in the majority) are forced to hunt along the margins of the degraded fishing grounds of our inshore, scratching a living from whatever the trawlers and dredgers have left behind, and frequently having a lot of their creels destroyed into the bargain.

The whole art of inshore fishing is to find somewhere that hasn’t, in our case, been scallop dredged. A couple of years ago, after a prolonged and exhaustive period of consultation, the Scottish Government set up a network of MPAs (Marine Protected Areas) which protect a very small proportion of our inshore waters from mobile fishing. These have shown encouraging signs of recovery; but sadly are still being illegally dredged. Without enforcement, the MPAs mean nothing.

I’ll never forget a cold dark day last November: we were fishing within the Loch Sunart to Sound of Jura MPA on a spot where we had previously been lucky. I dropped one of the divers down only to have him surface within a few minutes, almost crying as he related the destruction he’d discovered.

An entire reef reduced to rubble. A ground that would have fed us and our markets for months without damage to other species or habitat, had been cleared in a night. The resultant catch would have sold for many times less than we would have achieved.

We feed upon the crumbs from the giant’s table even though there are more of us than them.

There are individuals and groups currently lobbying, as there always have been, for the restoration of the three-mile limit. This would take courage and vision on the part of the Scottish Government but it would be a true eco-system approach to conservation. And I am not just referring to our marine environment and the creatures within it, but also to the human eco-systems that would benefit.

The static sector would be able to expand and invest more in boats, equipment and crew. Catches would have higher value, meaning a shift from quantity to quality. The sector would have to be properly managed, however. The vital point is that degrading forms of fishing would be stopped from their horrendous destruction of our once fecund shallows.

Our inshore habitat belongs not just to the fishers but to Scotland. Endless studies confirm that the lifting of the three-mile limit has been a catastrophe. So what does it take to do the obvious and reinstate it? Vision and courage. Our leaders must look at the clear facts and study other examples such as Norway, where dredging is banned, and they have a healthy fishery.

Our politicians must try to see beyond aggressive opinions of entrenched and destructive minority lobby groups distorting the facts. They must look beyond the short term.

Politicians must sort this out, not fishers, as free debate does not exist within fishing groups or in local communities as it is too difficult for people to speak out without suffering intimidation. They must have the courage to implement a real plan to rebuild our exceptional marine inshore environment before it is too late, saving it from the grip of those who falsely present themselves as custodians, thinking they have a right to destroy what belongs to all of us.

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We feed upon the crumbs from the giant’s table though there are more of us