Anglers face Eurocracy

Sea Anglers are to be brought into the Common Fisheries under plans from the EU according to the BBC.

At a stroke, a large number of jobs will be lost from the tourism industry, huge amounts of paperwork will be created and there will be virtually nil impact on fish stocks.

At the moment, commercial trawling is regulated by the CFP to preserve fish stocks. As is well documented, this has had some benefit to fish numbers, but also leads to lots of problems in terms of paperwork and dumped fish.

Sea anglers are not currently regulated. Some are serious fishermen who catch a reasonable number of fish (but tend to do so in a sustainable way, and still nothing to seriously dent the numbers caught by trawlers) and others fall into the day tripper tourist category. Trippers catch some fish, they tend not to be experts and it is more about fun than fishing. But they have to be taken out by somebody and so boats and skippers are kept in business by this trade. Almost every coastal town will offer these excursions.

Requiring boat skippers to register and apply for licences will cost them money and lead to many of them leaving an already precarious business. And the net gain in terms of fish preserved will be so minimal as to be completely without worth.

Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of this proposal is that the EU Commission is trying to preserve sole - a severely over-fished species. The trouble is that sole is a sea bed dwelling fish and is almost never caught by anglers.