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cleeclive

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  1. It might well fly in the face of the eel take ban merchants, but they have got it wrong. When I talk to the few remaining ell fishermen I know there are plenty of eels about. As I said in a previous post this is the classic case of people trying to manage something that nature is perfectly capable of managing as is the case with most fisheries management. Nature and fisheries economics cannot make a much worse mess of things than the EU and a bunch of fisheries scientists, so it would be a lot cheaper to leave it to nature and sack the rest of them. Happy New Year everyone
  2. I said in a post not long ago that nature would sort this out, get the jet stream in the right place and some good winter atoms and floods and all the maggot drownets will be cursing eels in 5 years time and calling for an eel cull. You can't fight nature.
  3. I suspect that there is some eel paranoia here, reading this article on the research and a few things fall into place. Global climate change, changing currents in the atlantic and less eels getting back to europe, panicking scientists and environmentalists trying to fight nature and save the planet! Have we not seen this with bee populations and stories of doom and gloom and then 2013, a long hot summer and there are more bees than we can imagine, nature sorting the job out again! I have seen NESFC trying to manage the cockle populations at Horseshoe point in Lincolnshire for years, a total waste of time and money because every time we get a prolonged easterly storm the beds are washed out, and then every 7 years or so we have a massive spat fall from a non-existent stock and the balance of nature is restored again. There is this massive industry of scientists and environmentalists out there spending our taxes on fighting nature, kidding us that they know what they are doing and they don't. Don't worry, one day the ocean currents will change and there will be a massive year class of glass eels return and we will all be happy again despite all your debates on hooks, sainsburys selling jellied eels and those terrible commercial eel fishermen destroying the last of the stocks. Nature will sort it all out for us in the end!
  4. Is the stance here taken by the Angling trust not somewhat farcical when we have a legal and regulated commercial eel fishery allowed in the UK. I think that they should be shouting at the Environment Agency not Sainsburys or Tescos if they have concerns about eel management. I was a part time commercial eel fisherrman over 20 years ago and at that time there was a lot of illegal fishing taking place. This is not the case now as the public is much more aware and soon reports any illegal activity to the authorities. I would think that if a supermarket purchases eels from a licencesed source they have every reason to believe that the fishery is sustainable, and if it is not I would suggest that fishery managers are not doing their sums correctly!
  5. Regrettably these things do happen as they do in all other forms of boating. On the whole I feel that kayak anglers are a fairly responsible group and are aware of the dangers, but we can all make mistakes especially in the early stages of our kayak fishing careers. Some of us will learn by those mistakes and others may be put off the sport by them. It is always sensible to go out with a mate or in a small group for safety and it is wise to undertake some training in the safety aspects if at all possible to help us manage the risks, but inevitably accidents will happen.
  6. This is a very interesting topic and there are two very valid view points here. Do we want a relatively inefficient fishing industry that supplies a living for large numbers of indigenous coastal fishermen and has a relatively high cost to police and manage. Alternatively we sacrifice the high employment involved in coastal fishing communities and have a much smaller number of super size and technologically advanced vessels which can be monitored by satelites , carry inspectors on board etc which are much cheaper to manage. We could say that British policy is heading towards option 2 . On a global scale the ricer nations are undoubtedly exploiting the resources of smaller nations, something that colonial powers have always done. This is a debate about economics over social sustainability, and wherever we have the latter it usually has to rely on subsidy to survive, like French Agriculture Many of us want to turn the clocks back, but we cannot stop progress. What we have to do is limit the growth of the world's population which is the biggest danger to the world's natural resources.
  7. This discussion about numbers of old cod is totally irrelavent and little more than a pointless red herring in my opinion. The damage to large cod was done by the gill net fleets during the 80's and 90's who were wreck netting. As for the media article this was typical sensasionalist journalism which picks on a couple of points from a report or briefing. Callum Roberts I have little time for as he loves to support these ridiculous attempts at journalism in his mission to make a name for himself. He should stick to Marine biology which I am sure he is very good at and stop his stupid mission to destroy the fishing industry at every opportunity. The survival of cod will be far more about a strong year class with low levels of juvenile predation and fishing mortality which usually happens every 20 years or so.
  8. We visited the fur seal colony on the Skeleton coast in a few years back,while driving around Namibia, they are a serious issue there. They have a seal factory nearby, and they nip out in the early morning and harvest their daily quota before the tourists arrive. It did not appear to have any significant impact on numbers.
  9. I said many years ago that you could scrap all fisheries scientists and Fisheries enforcement officers and leave fisheries management for economics to sort out. When you look at the costs of assessing and policing fishereis compared to other industries it would save the taxpayer a few bob. With the cost of vessels and operating costs no one would be chasing the last few fish in the shoal. I seriosly doubt if stocks would be in a much worse state if that had been done, the only problem would be if fishermen had received subsidies to help their operations. This point could lead to another interesting debate!!
  10. Cull might not be a politically correct term, but basically it is exactly the same as population management, be it seals, elephants or whatever. So long as it is done on the basis of some scientific studies which show a need to manage a population sustainably we may well need to cull a proportion of the population. We are now seeing problems with urban fox populations, which some may well love and others are not so keenon, when their daughters pet rabbit or chickens have just been ripped to pieces. Foxes enjoy killing for entertainment, as seals do. Wildlife has been managed for long enough by gamekeepers, who were very skilled at their job, now it seems taboo to suggest killing anythig, and I will not deny that the commercial fishing sector has killed too much. To quote "Andrew Tate" I spend a fortune building a ship to catch fish, if the scientists get their sums wrong don't blame me if it all goes wrong., or words to that effect.
  11. Very true Andy. When I visited the seal colony at Donna Nook one Christmas I asked the Lincs nature trust rep what they ate, and he assured me that they had a sole diet of dragonettes and some othe non-commercial species. This is the Bull ... that these people are feeding the niave public. They need culling, end of story!
  12. This shark problem, if it is a problem? is of course strongly influenced by the high prices paid for fins and the growing wealth among the Chinese. I recall Omani beach boat fishermen being very excited if they caught a shark as its fins were worth more than a boat full of yellow-fin tuna when I worked there.
  13. This to me looks like a very reasonable approach, and if anglers respond in a mature way to such codes of practice there should be no need for legislation. regrettably as I observe the attitudes of some anglers they may be their own worst enemies in terms of what the future might behold. Personally I would support regional codes of practice , encouraged by positive education as a positive way forward.
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