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Morley admits failures as bodies wash up from sea bass trawling
Paul Brown and Tony Sutton
The Guardian January 10, 2003
A promise to modify vast trawl nets to save dolphins from slaughter has not been kept by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, resulting in continued dolphin and porpoise deaths along the south coast.
Thirty dead dolphins have been reported on Cornish beaches in the first nine days of the sea bass fishing season. The boats use the pair trawling system in which nets as large as football pitches are dragged by two trawlers, trapping not only the bass but also dolphins and porpoises feeding on the same shoals.
Elliot Morley, the fisheries minister, shocked by the carnage last year when hundreds of dolphins were washed ashore in the West Country and France, announced that he was bringing forward £30,000 trials of new nets and promised they would be in use as early as December, when the new season began.
The trial nets were made with a grid at intervals to allow intelligent dolphins to find their way out while the bass were trapped as they continued to follow the line of the net. The trials began in March but one of two video cameras fixed to the nets fell off. One tope shark was seen to make its escape through the grid but no dolphins were spotted. In other respects, the nets worked because the catch did not escape.
Mr Morley said yesterday: "Naturally we were upset that the camera fell off and we lost it. But still worse was the fact that the vessel we hired to resume the trials this December was accidentally rammed by the Dutch fisheries research vessel and deemed unfit for sea. We had paid for modifications to the boat so we had to put the trial back again while the ship was in dry dock being repaired."
The practice of pair trawling is banned in the US and some other parts of the world because of dolphin deaths. In Britain it is illegal to use the nets if the deaths of any non-targeted species exceed 1.7% of the population, but Mr Morley said no one knew how many dolphins there were.
Although he believed that the deaths figure was above 1.7%, the French and Dutch fisheries were hard to convince, and it needed an EU decision to ban pair trawling.
Stella Turk, Cornwall's coordinator for dolphin strandings, said: "This season could be one of the worst we've had since records began 10 years ago." Volunteers had been tagging dead dolphins and porpoises. "It has been heartbreaking," she said. "Some of the dolphins were females about to give birth."
It had been estimated that one dolphin died for every two casts of a trawl net, yet 30 had been killed in a single net.
Mr Morley said there was no point adopting the new nets until it was certain dolphins would be able to escape unhurt. "You can imagine my feelings about these setbacks," he said. "It is a blow. But we are determined to make progress this March during the spring bass season."
British boats make up less than a quarter of the bass fishery, the bulk being carried out by French fishermen, with 45 boats, and Dutch trawlers.
The EU is putting forward proposals to fit acoustic devices to nets to save porpoises.
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