stevieg

I saw it at the time mate, a fantastic trip and a great read......

Paul are you having a laugh in regards to sleaze....... After the decimation of the UK economy I would put sleaze at number 2 on the last Governments Legacy List...........

It wouldn't matter who was (sort of) in power right now, they would not win any popularity contest. The cuts are painful and hard to take, but they are absolutely necessary to hopefully get this country back on it's feet. People simply do not like pain no matter how essential it may be. It is easy to be the nice guy, throwing around money which you can't ever pay back like confetti, it takes balls to bring the illusionary happy days to an end. I am actually surprised that their poll ratings are not much lower. Lovely cod fishing reports lately Paul, fantastic stuff, nice one........

An excellent post. To give Blair, Brown and co their due, it must take true talent to turn a vibrant economy into a basket case in short time, but to ensure that it remains a basket case well into the future is the work of true genius......... New Labour created the illness, we should not blame the doctor if the only cure for this illness is none too palatable. Yes I know that there was a worldwide recession bla bla bla, but they were 100% responsible for the sorry state the UK was in to deal with recession. Imho UK Plc was going down the tubes rapidly, recession or no recession, it was a very convenient scapegoat. When you consistently spend more than your income there is only one ending, rocket science it ain't. Control an economy indeed, it is quite clear it would have been an extremely risky business to let them have the controls to the telly.........

I open the bidding with 7...........

You would think it did, the CFP must now be the world gold standard for how not to manage anything....... As you say it has created a huge industry, the CFP has been brilliant for bureaucrats. Donkeys years ago these same bureaucrats obviously decided that conserving their inflated salaries and pension rights was far more important than conserving any fish stocks, hence why we are where we are now. Round and round the desk the paper fish merrily go, while in the real world perfectly marketable prime fish are thrown back into the sea dead, all in the name of conservation of course.........

Not too sure about that, was access to what once were UK fish stocks not the golden dowry the UK brought to the party all those years ago......

I am unsure as to the current situation, but there were some seriously winking rear ends in the Recreational Fishing world in the States late last year......... http://advocacy.shimano.com/publish/conten...60_million.html

This whole MCZ thing is rapidly descending further into a an even bigger farce......

Glenn that sounds very much like emotional blackmail.......

Gawd Elton, I thought for a moment there that Angling Misrepresentation had been made an Olympic sport...........

Yip, they can never ever recover they said....unfortunately they did, big time......the biggest problem they have now is the huge quantities showing up as bycatch in other fisheries........most inconvenient to the doomsday scenario peddlars........ Are they pre or apres manipulation figures glenn? Paul seems to be the man on scene regularly, I much prefer on the scene up to the minute reports......what was the title of this thread again......

Hi Glenn I always find this wiping out the stocks talk pretty hard to comprehend. I find it bizzare that you can wipe out the stocks day in day out for decades but they are still there.......beats me........

Hi Wurzel I should have been clearer, I meant a sensible fast moving, targeted area Cod Closure scheme, not the sledgehammer close the entire world approach.....or do they now have just such a sensible scheme down Sarf, sounds far too sensible for DEFRA.....

Not being a great believer in Immaculate Conception, there must be an awful lot of bigger cod getting Jiggy Jiggy somewhere out there Paul. Protection would be a good idea for this class of fish for sure, how that can be achieved without closing the entire area down to all, with the social and economic costs which that would bring, I have no idea.....apart from adopting the Scottish Government Cod closure scheme anyway, which as far as I am aware DEFRA and the Englandshire SFCs seem oblivious to..........

I baffle myself at times, don't worry about it......

Lets hope that it comes soon enough Clive, before we are all managed into oblivion......

Hi paul Should you not be comparing apples to apples and not apples to pears, you give the local Whitby fleet hell, yet the fishing from Whitby is "the beez knees for cod compaired to anywhere else but not in the numbers it once was"....surely if the local fleet were to blame then the Whitby fishing would be at best, the same as everywhere else, and probably a lot worse. Surely you should be comparing Whitby with everywhere else in the country right now, and not comparing modern Whitby to Whitby in 1847 or whenever. Given your comment above, you should be thanking your local commercials for Whitby being "the beez knees for cod" and not pillorying them...... I would like to still buy a house on a £100 a month mortgage, but it aint like that any more. I do not however hold my local bank manager responsible for that......

Pmsl....good answer Paul..... It could however also be said that no matter how hard you work, how much knowledge you have or how lucky you get every single day that you are out there, you simply can't catch fish which do not exist........I know that you are good but......

Possibly the fellas on the local trawlers are saying......."there's big Paul, taking his customers to the same old haunts again, those same old haunts where he keeps telling us that there are no fish left"..........

That's the decades old problem which many don't seem to comprehend Elton, the fish are there, they are a Common EU resource whether we like it or not, and someone will catch the quota of them.......if it ain't the UK fleet then it will be someone elses fleet.......simples.... If that fleet just happens to be one of our Continental cousins fleets then I suspect that will be just right up the EUs street, can you just imagine the Brownie points in Brittany and Galicia, you can't buy that kind of good will. As the saying goes, a lot of RSA should be very careful what they wish for.....the catching of fish commercially in UK waters isn't going away, who does that catching may change, but I doubt it would be change in the UKs best interests........be that commercial fishermen, RSA or the man on the street........

Easy chaps, with the shrinking of the commercial industry there are a lot of fisheries managers needing something to manage.........and if the clowns are daft enough to jump up and down shouting........"Hey we are over here, come and get us".......who can blame them if their opportunistic tentacles slither RSAs way..........

Oi.....stop spoiling a good headline with the truth........

An interesting snippet on the might of the Windfarms. During the recent cold snap, on the coldest day of the Winter so far, the entire UK windfarm industry managed to contribute the colossal total of less than 0.1% of the nations power needs, which isn't very much no matter how they want to paint it up..........

What do you expect for £20 Dave, surely not representation....... In all honesty, your mate got one of the more sensible answers that I have heard of from the AT. It may have been lacking in meat but at least it was half sane..........which is pretty unusual..........