Fishing industry doomed?

[Right Pongal]

Aye well said Tony, its about time somebody put it straight to these land-lubbers. This week's Fishing News highlighted record landing into the NE this week from a pair team working in the North Sea. By all reports, they were all good fish. The place is polluted with haddock, and although there's not many cod these days, they are well documented to have migrated North to avoid the global warming (Must have been sweltered).

Good on you for highlighting the human cost of bringing the fish home to people's plates.

[Sweltered]

Nobody was disputing it.

[jester and the fool]

[quote="EMDEE"]The scientists believe that there will be a huge increase in the numbers of jellyfish.

An opening here for any innovative chefs?

:lol: :lol: :lol:[/quote]



jellyfish done in batter,get on.If it can be done with cola and jelly already ....its just a case of finding the right one :shock: :?

[judge roy bean]

what a bunch of soogins!!

i fine you $100 for missing the man's point and the varmint that claimed he was on holiday? for that many posts it must be a 365 day holiday

so i fine you $40 for lyin around!!

so speaketh the judge!!!


justice you sons of bitches!!!

[big tony]

been lyin low for a few days, sorry petewick if my remark offended your sensitive eyes in any way, only mentioned it as a reply to a previous posting

i'm probably the most positive person i know, and i positively know that word for word, there are no equals roon an aboot (xcept one and he's no speakin)

hows that for lookin at the positives, but i suppose you have to live the life you've been dealt and my remark was in some way in answer and explanation to the trials and consequenses of a lifestyle that is largely dismissed by others. sad to see theres not many that are man enough for the job these days, not bright enough, thats a different skill, i ken hunners oh dunnerheids that spent a life afor the mast(i've got my hand up, have you?)

we're all smart and clever on here in the warmth oh the fire or the sun, depending on your local, but i knew a man that'd kick yir erses the length oh the auld quay for some of the comments on this thread.

i'll say no more, save to say, to put a finer more basic point on it, yir all wankers, so frick off

[Reidiboy]

been lyin low for a few days, sorry petewick if my remark offended your sensitive eyes in any way, only mentioned it as a reply to a previous posting

i'm probably the most positive person i know, and i positively know that word for word, there are no equals roon an aboot (xcept one and he's no speakin)

hows that for lookin at the positives, but i suppose you have to live the life you've been dealt and my remark was in some way in answer and explanation to the trials and consequenses of a lifestyle that is largely dismissed by others. sad to see theres not many that are man enough for the job these days, not bright enough, thats a different skill, i ken hunners oh dunnerheids that spent a life afor the mast(i've got my hand up, have you?)

we're all smart and clever on here in the warmth oh the fire or the sun, depending on your local, but i knew a man that'd kick yir erses the length oh the auld quay for some of the comments on this thread.



i'll say no more, save to say, to put a finer more basic point on it, yir all wankers, so frick off

[judge roy bean]

tut tut, but never a truer word spoken by man


justice you sons of bitches

[Annie]

I just found this searching for something else on line!

Is it history repeating itself, or are the fights over the fish just a way of life in Scotland!

THE MULL OF KINTYRE FISHERY
Angus Martin

The hand-line fishery for cod and saithe at the Mull of Kintyre was worked at both by local fishermen - from Southend and Sanda -and by crews from the twin villages of Portnahaven and Portwemyss on the Rinns of Islay. Crew belonging to Ballycastle in the north of Ireland were said also to have fished the Mull until the declining years of the nineteenth century, and oral tradition in the Southend district affirms that one, at least, of these visiting fishermen, John McKay, brought his family from Ballycastle and settled in Southend.

The Islay fishermen evidently began to come to the Mull fishery about 1900. The first reference in the annual reports of the Fishery Board for Scotland appears in 1902. In that year "some crews tried the Mull of Cantyre, but they returned home without obtaining any good results." The shift to the Mull grounds was forced by the failure of their native saithe fishery. "Saithe are chiefly to be found where herrings are plentiful," the report maintained, "so that fishermen ascribe the non-success of the fishing to the scarcity of herrings on their coast." The previous year's fishery off the Rinns had also been a "complete failure," and these bad seasons the fishermen attributed to the diversion, to the Irish coast, of the migratory herring shoals, "a belief which appeared to receive some support from the success of the fishing on the west coast of Ireland this winter."

In the minds of these Islaymen was no doubt agitated the recent and bitter memory of the catastrophic collapse of the great Islay herring fishery, from which their fortunes may fairly be said never to have recovered. That fishery, which in 1886 first attracted Kintyre fishermen, and which, by 1889, had become a national concern, ended suddenly in 1894. Its dramatic, if brief, history is documented in my own (book) The Ring-net Fishermen. The native island fishermen, who adhered doggedly to the traditional drift-net method, resented the incursions of the Kintyre crews, with their phenomenally productive ring-net method. Relations between the Islaymen and the Kintyre visitors finally broke down in 1691, as one incident, reported in the Campbeltown Courier of 26 September in that year, will illustrate.

"....The Islaymen had been quietly maturing a plan of attack upon their brethern from Kintyre, and resolved to treat them very much as Captain Cook was treated when he attempted first to land upon the South Sea Islands. when our men proceeded to cast their nets they were vigorously pelted with stones. Moving about two miles further along the shore, they were followed (we presume in boats) and the same barbarous treatment repeated. At last one of the nine or ten pairs of Campbeltown boats shot their net, the other skiffs surrounding them to afford them as much protection as possible. Their crew succeeded in hauling 38 boxes of splendid large herrings in circumstances the reverse of favourable."

In the early years of the Islaymen's involvement in the Mull fishery, eight or ten skiffs were said to have come across, but in the final years that number was reduced to two or three, and, ultimately, to a single skiff. The advanced ages of the latter Islaymen were remarked upon by those in Kintyre who rmembered their coming, and that may well have been a factor in the decline.

The fishermen slept in thatched huts, built of turf and stone, on the shore of the bay marked on maps as Port Mean - Port Min, the Calm Port - but more simply known as Glemanuill or Glenanuill Fort. There is, however, an Islay tradition - belonging, presumably, to the earliest years of the fishery - that they took their boats into a bight of the coast and "slept under the sail." That bight was known to the Islaymen as Port na Maoile (the Port of the Mull), which is almost certainly a name which they themselves made because there is no knowledge of it at all in Kintyre. where exactly "Port na Maoile" was, cannot now be ascertained, but probably it was one and the same with the bay at Glemanuill.

I got that information from Mr. Gilbert Clark, Port Charlotte, Islay. Confirmation of the Islaymen's practice of sleeping under sail at the Mull fishery reached me in a remarkably circuitous way. The Ballycastle historian, Mr. Hugh Alexander Boyd, had been advising me on the Islay links with Ireland, and during our correspondence Mr. Boyd quite fortuitously mentioned that in Port Ellen, Islay, he had taken notes from one of the last of the Islay fishermen who had known the Mull. These notes were few, admittedly, but in the absence of any more direct information on the Islaymen's involvement there, I was grateful to have them.

That old Islayman with whom he had spoken, and whose name regrettably is unknown, had gone to the Mull as a boy. His duties there were tp keep the fire going at the shore station and to ensure that the cured fish were not spoiled by rain as they dried on the rocks. This suggests that he had no part in the actual fishing, which seems reasonable enough. He also spoke of their sleeping under sail, which simply involved lying in the boats under cover of the canvas. This was a fairly comon practice among the open boat herring fisherman of Kintyre, as elsewhere, and co-existed with the practice of camping ashore in tents and wooden huts. These customs predate the advent of decked skiffs, which furnished the fishermen with sleeping accomodation and cooking facilities in the boats.

A couple of the Islaymen's huts plainly remain, in fairly sound state considering the extreme crudeness of their construction. Each of these huts lies to the west of the burn there, and the shape of each was governed by the conformation of existing rock. The building which is closest to the burn has been constructed within a natural recess of rock, and that farther west has as its seaward wall a rock face. The walls are formed of rough unmortared rocks, large and small together, built up with little attention to regularity of structure. Other huts there probably were, but these, if they remain, are less certainly identifiable. Some may have been predominantly of turf, and have since collapsed. If, as Islay oral evidence suggests, as many as ten crews were attending the Mull fishery, then the necessity of some crews' sleeping under sails becomes apparent, because neither of these remaining huts could possibly have accommodated more than a single crew, and uncomfortably at that.

The sole scrap of written evidence of the Islaymen's huts appeared in a newspaper report of the wreck of the Glasgow cargo steamer, Pirate, at Port Mean in October 1913, during a night of heavy fog. The crew abandoned the foundering vessel, taking ashore their belongings, which they placed "in a hut on the shore which is used as a shelter by the Islay fishermen when they come to prosecute the cod fishing at the Mull."

THE BOATS

The names and owners are known of a few of the Rinns boats which fished the Mull:

Malcolm MacNeill's Guiding Star, CN593, 26 ft. of Keel;

John Turner's Harvest, CN606, likewise 26 ft. of keel:

Neil MacIntyre's Try Again, CN646, 22 ft. of keel (all of Portnahaven.)

Neil MacNeill's Christina, CN566 24 ft. of keel, and belonged to Portwemyess.

Donald MacNeill's Lily of Portwemyss, CN 162: Fuller specifications are available. She was built in 1880 at Moville in Ireland, had a keel length of 24 ft., and overall length of 25.8 ft., was 6.5 ft. of beam, and 2.1 ft. of draught.

That class of line-skiff was known in Campbeltown and Dalintober as a 'Greencastle skiff,' usually contracted to 'Greenie,' but though Greencastle in Donegal certainly was a boat-building centre - James McDonnell there was active into the present century - its significance was slight in Kintyre and Islay, which together constituted the true geographical range of the Irish skiffs' distribution in Argyll, proximity to and cultural affinity with the north of Ireland being the obvious determining factors.

Of a total of 36 Irish-built skiffs registered at Campbeltown, 12 were built by James Kelly, 8 by James Hopkins, and 2 by John Kelly, all of Portrush. Eight more were registered as Portrush built, but the builders' identities were undisclosed, and one vessel was simply credited to 'Kelly, Portrush.'No fewer than 31 out of a total of 36 skiffs, therefore, originated in Portrush, but the inadequacy of these deductions must, however, be declared. The period which these statistics span is a circumscribed one, because the registers of fishing boats, prior to 1902, contain no information on builders or their location, and the record closes in 1926 with the delivery of the last Irish skiff.

The timber trade between Norway and Ireland seems to have facilitated the importation of these craft, possibly as deck cargoes. That Trondheim was one of the ports of their origins attested in linguistic evidence from the Portrush area. That type of boat was known there as a "Drumtin boat", and even into the present century the native version of these skiffs - which began to be introduced after the cessation of the timber trade - continued to be described as 'the Drontheim build.'

ON THE SHORE.

The names of the principal fishing families of Portnahaven were MacIntyre, MacNeill, MacArthur, MacKay, MacAulay, Ferguson and Turner, and of Portwemyss, MacNeill, MacMillan, Turner and Anderson.

When the prospects of a fishing became apparent - and the first sign was the appearance of gannets around the Mull - the Islay-men would be notified by the shepherd at Glemanuill, Ronald MacAllister. He and his wife befriended the visitors and shared with them the produce of kitchen and garden. The late Alastair Beattie was a nephew of Ronald MacAllister and was accustomed, as a boy, to spending his summers at Glemanuill. His regular evening errand was to carry down the glen to the "ould Islaymen" a can of sour milk and a batch of fresh soda scones. The basic diet of the Islay-men was, however, the fish which they were catching. Alastair Beattie remembered: "Man, ye know, when they wid come in wi' their boat fae the fishin they wid jeest boil a fish in a pot an when it wiz ready they jeest teemed the whole lot oot on tae the rock, a kinna clean flat bit o'rock, ye know. The waater, of coorse, wid aa' run off an they jeest got round that an got at it wi' thir finger.. Right ould hardy men they were. I mind fine gan doon wi' the scones an the soor milk tae the Islaymen."

The huts were entirely unfurnished, and the fishermen's bedding was a layer of dry withered bracken spread on the ground. The boat was hauled above high water mark each evening as a precaution against rising wind in the night, and Alastair Beattie, boy though he was, used to "gie them a hand" with the beaching of that boat.

THE FISHING.

The actual fishing was confined to the period of slack water at the Mull, generally from 30 to 40 minutes, though a little fishing might be had immediately before and after slack water. But within that limited work period - no longer than an hour usually - the fishermen would be "kept going hard." The Islaymen went round and returned with the tides and little use of either sail or oars was required. At Glemanuill they immediately entered the full strength of the ebb tide, which carried them around to the Mull; they returned on the flood with equal ease to their station. For the Southend fishermen, further west, the distance to and from the fishing ground was greater, and the use of sail or oars was necessary to get them into a position of advantage with the tide on their passage to the ground; equally, on their return, after losing the force of the easterly current they had to carry on under their own power. The Islaymen, thus, were sometimes able to take two fishing in a single day from the Mull grounds.

The fishery began in the spring of the year. Cod and saithe were attracted in multitudes by the passage of great herring shoals eastward around the Mull and into Clyde waters. Gannets and gulls, too, congregated there, and the spectacle was a magnificent one. Captain Hugh McShannon, born at Southend in 1901, fished at the Mull as a boy under the tutelage of Dick Gillon of Southend. Captain McShannon, who later followed the sea beyond his native Kintyre, is the last person living who can speak, from direct erperience,of that fishery. He remembered the gannets striking so densely on the herring shoals that, on a bright day, their falling mass "blotted out the sun."

In the final years of the Mull fishery merely two boats from Southend were at it; the Dempseys of Sanda had, by then, given it up. The boat which Dick Gillon used for that fishery was the Irish-built Lizetta,CN 15. She was 16.5 feet of keel, with an overall length of 18 feet, a beam of 5.4 feet and a draught of 2.5 feet. The other skiff was Archibald Cameron's Kate,CN 17, built in 1904 by James Kelly of Portrush. She was a more substantial craft, being 20.5 ft of keel, 22.6 ft in overall length, with a beam of 7 feet and a draught of 2.5 ft. Hugh McShannon remembered her as being so beautifully varnished that every nail-head in her timbers was visible.

The sole Islay skiff that visited the Mull was, by contrast, old and heavily layered with tar. These vessels carried oars, a small lug sail, and a jib. The sailing qualities of the Kate, particularly, Hugh McShannon recalled with admiration. With wind on the beam or abaft the beam, she moved with marvellous grace and spirit.

The catches - cod and stainlock (the big saithe) - were taken with hand lines. The initial baiting was a piece of gleshan (immature saithe), but when a catch had been secured the big hooks would be baited with a strip, seven or eight inches long, of the tough silvery underbelly of the saithe (Gaelic clibeam, 'a dangling end'). The line itself consisted of a two-feet long twine snood,attached at one end to the main lime and to the other end of which was secured the hook. The whole was weighted with a long lead sinker.

Saithe were generally caught close to the surface, but to take cod the line had to find the bottom. Fishing would begin just off the Mull lighthouse and the boats would be allowed to drift westwards towards Rathlin on the failing run of the ebb, though there might at times be a man on the oars pulling against the drift to keep the boat over a spot where fish were taking well. With the turn of the tide the boats would begin to drift into the east; sinker and line would stream away with the force of the current; the fishing would be over.

Catches would be salted and dried. The fish were gutted and beheaded, and the backbone removed from the anus up, leaving only the tail bones and the tail. The skin, with scales remaining, was left intact. The split fish would then be immersed in brine to "draw the blood" from them, after which they would be placed in tubs of stronger brine to salt them thoroughly. The most troublesome stage of the entire operation was the drying of the fish. Those responsible for the tending of the drying fish in Southend, usually the fishermen's wives - had continually to be wary of rain, which would necessitate the covering of the fish.

The folk of the district could buy a big cod for a shilling and a stainlock for sixpence. Some customers bought direct from the Islaymen at their station, but batches of dried fish would be landed by skiff at Dunaverty for sale in the village store. According to an earlier tradition, the fishermen would take their boats into a rocky gullet of the shore below the present house of Achnamara, immediately west of Dunaverty Bay, and unload their dried fish there. That landing place was known as the Islaymen's Port.

Perhaps the greater portion of the Islaymen's catch would, however1 be stockpiled for sale at the Lammas Fair in Ballycastle. The custom of attending that fair evidently ended in 1912, when the Rinns men failed to dispose entirely of their stock of dried saithe.

Their involvement in the Mull fishery effectively ended two years later, in 1914. In the succeeding year they were prevented, by a local policeman, from occupying the huts, under the Defence of the Realm prohibition of lights along the coast. Remarkably, that year was the last in which fish were known to have gathered at the Mull. The Southend men, Dick Gillon and Archie Cameron, with their crews, got a fishing out of that season, but thereafter the Mull was abandoned. The people of Southend afterwards maintained: "They put away the Islaymen and they put away the fish."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

The above article has been adapted from a paper given at the Edinburgh Folk Festival Social History Conference of 3 April,1982. I am indebted, for assistance and advice to Hugh McShannon, Campbeltown; Gilbert Clark, Port Charlotte, Islay; the late Alistair Beattie, Southend; Philip Galbraith, formerly fishery officer, Campbeltown; Hugh A. Boyd, Ballycastle; and Michael McCaughan, Ulster Folk and Transport Museum.

[Sweltered]

Yes

[Annie]

Yes

Sweltered, I don't know which you are saying "yes" to, please clarify!!!

[Sweltered]

Is it history repeating itself, or are the fights over the fish just a way of life in Scotland!

[Bobbie En Tejas]

Yes

Sweltered, I don't know which you are saying "yes" to, please clarify!!!

Let's just be glad he didn't paste the quote before he responded!

[Annie]

Sorry! I really did not think that the article was that long!

[Bobbie En Tejas]

Don't be sorry, you won the prize!

[Beachcomber]

Sorry! I really did not think that the article was that long!

No worries. Do you still have the address of the site where you found it?