nets nets nets feking nets

[brillo]

Fished from Kinsale last saturday with butch roberts on "sundance kid". Went out to the wellheads 20 miles out to find them covered with nets..then to a ww2 plane ...tiny target... netted also,no fish on either, seems like a waste of time going wreck fishing if the net men are going to net anything that might concievably hold a fish or two. This is going to ruin the charter boat skippers livelihoods if allowed to continue,also will put tourist anglers off returning in the future,apparantly one boat brought in 60 boxes of fish last week from the wrecks. How long will it take for them to recover, if ever ,if this is to be a continued sustained assault.any ideas on what can be done to allow everybody a share of whats available. All i want is to catch and release a big coalie.The sea was chocked with sprat on saturday ,huge shoals of them, so any fish we caught were stuffed to the gills with them. Hope this bodes well for the rest of the year.If anyone knows of any wreck marks that are not targeted by these fekers i would love to get out to one. brillo.

[septicsac]

Same auld story around all coasts
Welcome aboard Brillo and hope you enjoy the site.............any pics of that wee black marlin

[dezzer]

welcome to the site brillo,its a shame about the nets,but this is a comon thing lately,stick to the small boat fishing,much more enjoyable,its a long way from kilkenny to kinsale,regards,eddie.................

[Fish Magnet]

These wreck netters, seem to be the only people getting hauls of fish at the moment. Once upon a time it was only really the Cornish men netting a lot of the south coast wrecks, now everybody's at it. I'd never dare suggest to cut off their Dahn buoys

[sandman]

Half of Europe's fishing fleet seem to be sitting off the west coast, anywhere from 12 to about 150 odd miles out. Do a search through the RTE news archives. It's once or twice a week that someone has to be helicoptered in or the RNLI go out to them. And that's just as injuries occur - which even in a dangerous occupation, can't happen on every boat, every day. So just think how many boats have to be out there gilling, trawling and lineing...

[screeming reels]

hi.
yes at any one time there is a LOT of trawlers off the irish coast, on a call out it can often be very difficult to identify the trawler we are going to because the radar is covered in radar contacts, that is one hell of a lot of fish every day.
I do not bother with the wrecks anymore as all thats left is scraps small ling and pollock, plus plenty of small pouting and poor cod, IF and its a big if, you get to a wreck thats benn left for a couple of weeks then it can produce results, but the time and effort and fuel costs now its not worth it.
I do feel very sorry for the charters it really is going to hurt them, but then again, in the government who cares!!! its
screeming

[Dave Jolly]

The Most prolific wrecks for the Coalfish are a good bit further out than the well heads, the reason they were netted was you were fishing too small a tide, you will not catch Coalfish unless you are fishing a tide of minimum 3.8mts, and at that strength you will find most wreck netters are stopping for the week of big tides. by the way, don't think you will be able to return the Coalfish when you do catch them as they will not go down again after coming up from 300 feet
Dave

[sandman]

Dave's hit on a couple of good points. In the larger tides of the sequence, gill nets only work for a small part of the tide - when the tidal stream is above a certain speed, the nets don't fish - they're basically blown flat to the seabed, rather than standing up like a wall.

I remember when gill-netting first took off, this was a problem. The guys who initially countered this with massively over-weighted and over-floated nets and who put on bigger haulers caught a lot more than those who fished smaller and lighter. Decimated the spurdog stock. Of course, in no time everyone was at it with predictable results.

And point two, hauling any fish as hard as you can from 100m is not going to do it any favours, particularly those with swim bladders. If you think about the reason divers take rest stops on ascent from 50m (I think that's the limit for sports divers and even from shallower depths on longer dives?) it's clear that rapid de-pressurisation isn't good.

Having said that, I did read about a cod tagging study that was done some time back where they lined cod and deliberately retrieved them from depth very slowly, then punctured their swim bladder with a canula, tagged them and released them. Quite a few turned up in commercial catches for some time after, so it's possible, with care, to do it. I've no idea (and the study couldn't say) what the mortality rate was from this but it had to have had some effect as at least some of the fish were caught and reported again later.