SIX skippers have admitted making illegal landings worth almost £15 million in the biggest scam in the history of Scotland’s fishing industry. The six included – David Hutchison and  Robert Polson – vice chairman & director of the Scottish Pelagic Fishermen’s Association who admitted 49 landings totaling £3,698K and 46 landings totaling £3,682K respectively. The [...]

FISHERMEN have issued a stark warning that their future is at stake unless the new government takes urgent remedial action. The Scottish Fishermen’s Federation (SFF) has said that large sections of the fleet faced being forced out of business. Their Chief Executive Bertie Armstrong said: "For an alarmingly wide proportion of the industry just now, [...]

A recently released study, Fish Dependence, by the New Economics Foundation and the European lobbying group Ocean 2012 says that the UK fishing industry cannot cope with demand because it has supplies which only last for seven months of the year. The report is argues that a full reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) [...]

Discarding is a common feature throughout global fisheries and of widespread management concern. The Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS) catch and discard data collection programme has been conducting sampling operations on English and Welsh registered fishing vessels in the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) subarea VII since 2002. [...]

Condensed from an article by Lindsey Partos, SeafoodSource contributing editor. 23 July, 2010. A vast majority of scientifically assessed stocks in the United Kingdom are fished at rates well above levels for high long-term yield, according to a new government report. Five years on from the UK’s Charting Progress report, the updated snapshot of the [...]

In a letter to Cod Crusader Carol MacDonald, sea fishery policy official Stuart Baxter told her that the Scottish Government understands her “frustration and concern”  over the process involved in trying to improve the Cod Recovery Plan, but like other governments, Scotland is stuck with the system. Mrs MacDonald had originally emailed Alex Salmond for [...]

Thanks to a 70-year old trawling ban, cod fishing in the sound between Sweden and Denmark could now be counted as 100 times more productive than in neighboring Kattegat, a new Swedish study shows. Whilst the Öresund area has an annual cod catch of approx 2,500 tonnes, cod catches in the ten times larger Kattegat [...]

Members post. “Knowledge gap between science and catch information from fishing grounds must be closed, says SFF” I continue to despair at Bertie Armstrong. Once again he is banging the drum that the real-time situation found by fishermen and the scientists do not agree, presumably making a case for increased quota. Ironically, he may be [...]

The Scottish fishing fleet is facing a days-at-sea crisis as white-fish vessels have used their catching-time allocations for this year far more quickly than expected and some feel they may have to tie-up for up to five weeks in the summer. Scottish Fishermen’s Federation (SFF) chief executive Bertie Armstrong admitted the industry had “simply got [...]