I have been warning that disaster is on its way for the bass. That will be a tragedy for those of us who like eating firm white fillets of wild “sea bass”, as restaurants insist on calling it, and for those of us who like catching our premier saltwater sporting fish on rod and line at this time of year. It will be tough, too, for a few thousand commercial fishermen for whom bass is a profitable sideline.
Bass stocks are in a dire state, as international scientists told the European Union in July. They called for an 80% cut in landings this year to save stocks from collapse, a cut that is most unlikely to happen. It is sad that just as other species, such as haddock and cod, are benefiting from more enlightened management in EU waters, the fish of arguably greatest personal interest to the largest number of citizens — 2m sea anglers as well as commercial fishermen — is headed for the same fate as the Newfoundland cod.
How, you may ask, can this happen, now that public understanding of overfishing is so much better than a few years ago and politicians are making decisions better informed by scientific advice? There had been things that didn’t add up. But they do now.
We knew that bass was one of those species that, until recently, existed outside the official EU framework of annual stock assessments and quota-setting. We knew that because stock assessments were left to individual member states and they didn’t happen often enough. From surveys conducted by British scientists, after a six-year gap, we know there has been a fall in the number of bass fry surviving to become young fish, which has been going on since about 2007. This was because of a number of colder winters.
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Fishermen now report catching very few small bass but say that large ones are plentiful. Angling charter skippers report a lot of handsome 2-4lb bass, but nothing much of a smaller size. Shore anglers report poor catches and a total collapse in some areas. What this means is that there is a gap in the stock, thanks to unsuccessful breeding years, and there is very little coming up behind. We are catching the brood stock and when the large fish are gone the bass may not come back for decades, if at all.
The bass crisis is to be discussed at an EU meeting in Dublin next week, but as views are polarised between Ireland, which banned commercial fishing for bass two decades ago in favour of recreational fishing, and France, which has the largest commercial catch, the EU will struggle to agree what should be done. As a result, a total collapse in bass stocks is possible by 2018 — after which the only bass on your plate is likely to be farmed.
Who, you may ask, is killing all these fish? You need to discount the usual suspects. Commercial fishermen accuse anglers of catching up to 30% of what is landed, without limits or records, with a few selling their catch illegally. That doesn’t account for a rapid rise in catches. The conventional explanation for this is the pair-trawlers, predominantly French but a few British, which tear their nets through the shoals of bass as they wait to spawn in the Channel each spring. They catch a lot, but we now know something else has been going on. Blaming the French will no longer do.
Technological advance has been behind all the great fish-stock crashes — the Californian sardine, the Newfoundland cod, the North Sea herring. What the so-called managers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs appear to have missed is something called mid-water trammel netting. This is a net of three vertical layers with different-size meshes that is drifted onto spawning shoals of bass. These nets can be hauled with deadly efficiency by fishermen in small boats using the latest fish finders. The technique was developed on the east coast near where I live and has spread, from Lincolnshire to Sussex.
Evidence comes from a report by a fisheries officer at Felixstowe Ferry, sent to me by an angling friend. “Huge numbers of bass were targeted and caught within a mile of the shore. Mid-water trammels were deadly, with fish being caught consistently around the 8lb-12lb mark, some of which easily exceeded this size,” he wrote.
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It is a story of happy fishermen enjoying plentiful catches, until you realise what is going on. This is the brood stock being hammered within our sovereign six-mile limit by us. Catches of bass in East Anglia have doubled in the past year. So instead of waiting for the slow wheels of the EU to turn, British ministers could act to restrict this method of fishing. They could save the bass within our waters before it is too late.
Everywhere I have been, fishermen blame someone else for what happens to them. The French blame the Spanish. The fishermen of Great Yarmouth blame the fishermen of Lowestoft. Just for once, should we not be honest, accept our part in an unfolding disaster and do something about it?