Sea Control - Sea Control 332 - Voices from the Shoreline with Mike Smylie

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

Links1. Voices from the Shoreline: The Ancient and Ingenious Traditions of Coastal Fishing, by Mike Smylie, The History Press, November 1, 2021.2. Kipperland.

Hey, Vogue Shared here. Today, my guest is author Mike Smiley, and we're talking about his book, Voices from the Shoreline. This episode was edited and produced by Alexia Boulaghi. We are still looking for audio editors to add to our team. If you're interested, please email us at ccontrol at simsec.org with your resume. We are also going to be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of SimSec on or about April 12th. So look out for a special podcast series with former SimSec presidents. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Plum, so you can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pot of Iron Brew Bottles wherever you download your podcasts.

On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Technology. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Mike Smiley. He's the author of one of the books that I recommended for the SimSec 2021 holiday reading list, Voices from the Shoreline, the Ancient and Ingenious Traditions of Coastal Fishing. So, Mike, thank you for coming on today. Would you mind providing an introduction to your readers? Hi, yeah, well, I'm Mike Smiley. I'm living in Great Britain, across the pond. I've been looking at fish. I've written 27 books, I think, about fish and fishery stuff.

so when people say I sort of breathe fish I smoke fish and I talk fish that's what it's about it's about fish that's me right so typically we link to authors previous works but I'm probably not going to drop 27 links in the show notes but I will look for an author page somewhere where we can find a collected version of everything that you've written but thank you again for coming on as a reminder all opinions are our own not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated so mike i'm going to use the phrase emotionally invested because it comes through in your writing that you're emotionally invested in these processes that are disappearing but how did you get this involved and emotionally invested in fishing

good question i um it all goes back to the about 1990 well before that i trained as a naval architect so i was always interested in boat design but then i left boat design went into the building trade and then in 1990 I ended up buying a boat in Portugal which was an old fishing boat from Scotland Scottish fishing boat and it had been built in 1912 and this year you know you get a boat like this you tend to research its history so I ended up in Campbelltown on the west side of Scotland at the bottom of Mullican Tire celebrating its 80th birthday in 1992 with the old fishermen and they started telling me the stories about the herring fishery and what the boat was used for and it just went from there really I started looking at herring first and

then I just started looking at all aspects of fish and fishermen and fishing boats and all the myths behind it and all the stories and how it's caught and I go fishing with people and so one thing just leads to another you know it's like a sort of cascade of information comes in and you just have to do something with it now you set out to chronicle the means of fishing on the west coast of the british isles why did you choose that area versus say focusing on the offshore fisheries first the west coast it's it's my coast it's the coast that i know i've lived on it very close to it actually on the water for a while i've sailed it so i know it pretty well and also when you talk about the salmon it is the richest coast from the whole point view of britain is the richest

coast of traditions and then you sort of realize just how many methods there are of catching fish which comes out in the book you know and that's why i was able to go from north devon right up the top of scotland and finding what was it 32 chapters worth of information the publisher told me i'd written too much i mean i could have read more and we'll talk about kind of the nature of the book too to me it was as much personality sketches of all these individual fishermen as it was about any fishing methods and they're just characters through the book I liked it a lot we'll talk about it in a minute here but how many different fishing methods do you reckon that you chronicle then did you actually have a favorite? I started off with the salmon which

is what I started looking at but then knowing Devon before long it became obvious I had to include the herring because there's the drift net fishery down there which is quite a unique fishery the way it's caught the fish is unique with it being a very small herring and then just up the coast in Minehead I came across a system where the nets are on the beach they're strung along the beach which as far as I know is unique in Britain I haven't come across any other place so after discovering that I thought well I'll just have to include herring as well because I wanted to talk about the shoreline rather offshore fishing could be quite boring really it's just trawling mostly gill netting and trawling that's what they do it's the stuff on the shoreline that's

so much more interesting it you know whether it's attached to the shore or slightly just off the shore it's much more interesting in my mind and much more diverse so that's why I stuck to the shoreline and that's why I really stuck to herring and salmon and then of course I had to drop in a little bit of shrimping because I came across a couple of really interesting shrimping methods that's why i stuck to those three i didn't go any further would you mind explaining the uh the drift net method to our listeners because i don't think if people haven't read the book would you go out and read it you would not believe the sheer quantity of ways that there are to catch fish as well as some of the kind of ingenious methods that people have developed over time

working with the tide in a lot of cases to bring in fish but yeah if you could explain that i'd appreciate it right well the drift net is probably one of the oldest um ways of certainly one of the oldest ways fishing with a net i guess the first old the set and then out from the shore in a circle and and drag it back in but a drift net works on a different process it is basically a net hanging in the water attached to the front of a boat and or sometimes the side of a boat or whatever but normally the front and it literally just sits in the water floating at the top and hanging down in the water and will drift with the tide and the fish are swimming with the tide as well and swim into it and they get caught by the gills and can't escape so it's very basic it was supposedly

invented by the dutchman called van buchels in i can't remember the date now 16 something or other But the Dutch commanded the herring fishery in the North Sea at one point until the British, mostly the Scottish, took it over and controlled the herring fishery. And it was all done on a drift net until the advent of the ring net, really, in the 1840s, 1850s, and then trawling came in. But drift net was the age-old method, and it is still used by some people, as is mentioned in the book. and then could you explain the method that you discovered as well there was set up along the beach i forget the name of it exactly i don't know if it's even got a name because i've never come across it anyway but i went out with these two is in minehead which is again on north devon coast north devon somerset coast and they basically have erected poles in the bed of the

foreshore going out perpendicular to the shore uh the nets are about the poles at least are about 10 foot apart and between each pole is a net and they hang these nets out and they can go way out 30 40 nets if they want they don't bother most of the time when i went they had three nets and that was plenty we caught plenty of herring but it's just basically a net hanging there that it dries out at low water and high water is in the water it's flooded because you've got to remember the bristol channel has the second highest tidal height in the world i think fundy bay is the highest and bristol channel is the second so it's got a really high difference between low water and high water and these nets the poles are about eight foot high

and they just sort of sit there and the herrings swim into them and get caught so it's like a drift net but it's fixed to the shore don't have to go out and then boat it's so much easier And I've not come across it anywhere else in Britain. But a lot of these methods, too, sounded a little bit dangerous to the fishermen. I'm thinking of the one gentleman that I believe you went out on the mudflats with him. So after the tide had gone out and he had about two hours to collect whatever you're going to collect out of these nets and then get back into shore. Can you describe that a little bit? That was Adrian with his mud horse.

Yeah, he has. Yeah, it's called the mud horse. and it's quite amazing you meet him at the top of the beach and he gets in his beaten up four by four and you trundle off down the beach in this four by four through rocks and bouncing all over the shop and then he stops and um ahead of you is just a sea of mud absolute sea of mud and you think well how the hell am i going to cross that he says to me you just walk along those sticks there down that little ditch there and along there and just be careful and i'll meet you over there where you can see his nets so i did that and he pulls this mud horse out of the mud he's all covered in stones there's a picture of it in the book but it's basically a sledge that he pushes

well someone described it as a cross between a sledge and a cart and he basically shoots across the mud on this thing pushing it but the way he walks he just walks through it and then he stops in the middle of it and you think he must know exactly where that's sitting standing on a rock in the middle of a sea of mud and he continues and you come to his nets his nets are they're just fixed nets and they're funnel shaped nets and they he had about 10 or 12 of them and he catches anything that whatever he can catch a lot of shrimp the odd salmon are not these days he's given up now actually very recently his father died and he'd given up completely now for the time being but anyway we had some all sorts of bits and bobs get in there but because they're

funnel shape and they're facing the incoming tide the fish swim in and they can't get out down the funnel so it's like a kite net and then you go to his second set of nets which are vertical nets and they are even further out and you're about you end up about what two miles offshore i should think and you're looking around and you think god if that water comes in and the tide can come in pretty quickly you've got to be aware and i said to him i said have you ever been caught out here And he said, only once. And he's got an emergency exit that he can go. And he will end up about three miles down the coast.

He has to walk all the way back up. But he knows his thing. And he just watches the tide. And he said to me, we've got to get back quickly now. We've got to go. So he knows what he's doing. He goes out several times a week. Yes, it's dangerous.

You hear lots of stories about people getting caught out, even further up the River Severn with the lathe nets, where they just stand in the water with a net you know have you had any uh close calls yourself as you were working through this story with these fishermen no definitely not i can say i haven't but i've certainly talked to those guys and i've met plenty of people who have but with the lave netters there's in 16 or something where i went out with the lave netters in the river seven well you wouldn't know it but there's a the second crossing of the river seven the bridge and they basically go just under the bridge just past it and they throw the anchor

over the side and you're 200 yards off the shore so you assume it's quite deep next thing they just jump over the side just up to their chest maybe a bit lower so it's not so deep but they've got the lave nets and they just go wandering around the walking around what must be fairly rocky with these nets um in the water people have fallen over up in scotland with have nets up on the Solway Firth talking to some of the fishermen out there I went fishing with them and they were saying that there'd been instances where people have fallen over and they've just drifted over I was on the Scottish side he said they tend to drift over to the English side and he said the fishermen over there would rescue them and bring them back again they'd drive them all the way

around but their nets on the roof so yeah you know there's plenty of mishaps you mentioned the English side the Scottish side a lot of what was in there and this isn't a question that we discussed previously, but I'd like you to talk about it if you can. There are a lot of like territorial considerations about who gets to fish where, some of that regulated, but some also by tradition as far as who gets to fish in which spot. Do you find that common up and down the coast that everyone has their own individual spots that they go to and the same families have been working the same piece of water for all this time? Well, yeah, there's two. I mean, in scotland they have a different they have heritage rights whereas in england in wales

it's not necessarily heritage rights but they will have the rights that they pay for they will pay for the annual license and so they have the right to fish but in many cases where there's groups of fishermen they will they will how they choose who fishes where they will move around in one place they basically throw this thing on the floor and i've never seen them do it actually quite like to see them do it but they throw the bit of wood and they each throw the bit of wood on the floor and the one that's picked up first is the first fisherman and it will have his name on it or number and basically it's just a you know a system of working it out democratically and then they will switch around number one will then become number two the next time and they will move around

same with the havenets they fish in a line they will do the same thing to who stands next to each other and who's the outer one and then the inner one will move to the out and they'll work it out like that so yeah they've come to agreement i'm sure there's plenty of arguments amongst them i would imagine like i haven't met a ton of fishermen but i mean they are kind of you know salty cantankerous characters to a certain point what's the current state of the western british coastal fisheries well the west coast is not very good at all the salmon there's no west coast salmon hardly any you know there's a problem with the atlantic salmon at the moment and there's various causes for it although i don't believe it's actually overfishing by the small coastal men

because they take such a small amount but they're the ones that are being blamed for it and they're the ones losing their licenses while the anglers are still catching salmon and they're not meant to but they are taking it home and it's not catch and release but obviously there's pollution's a huge problem here at the moment the water companies are pouring sewerage into the rivers raw sewerage they're allowed to by government which is just completely crazy we've got a problem here locally on the river y which is one of the most picturesque rivers in the country but it's become so polluted because the chicken farms one estimation was there was 200 chicken farms within the area of all the tributaries of the river y and the farms all the chicken manure is put on the

fields nearby in the proximity of the factories and it's all draining into the rivers and it's causing huge environmental problems in the river wyne so of course that's all adding to it up in scotland the seal population has it's hugely expanded and for every seal eats five salmon a day or whatever it does we wonder why there's no fish and birds is the other thing on the salmon smolts up the top of the river you know the salmon always swim back to their own river birds eating them that's why there's no salmon it's it's not the fishermen they catch such a small amount comparatively and you laid out some of the numbers that people have historically pulled out i think you had gone through somebody's diary or some sort of logbook i can't remember but they would

pull out a couple of fish in a day's fishing and they're going to take that to the market it was 14 fish on a good day and take it down to the market and i just found myself wondering like how were they subsisting on that kind of catch up into the 50s the 60s the 70s i mean i understand how inflation works but in latterly in time yeah yeah latterly i mean the more the catches how did they well they didn't i mean they fishermen at that time it would have been part-time i think the instance you might have been talking about was in north durban again with steven and his wife sheila steven and sheila and one time he had a butcher no he had a fish shop and so it would be part of their income because you couldn't subsist on two salmon or whatever so no but day

in the 40s 30s they were catching a lot more i've seen reports when they were catching up in scotland there were 980 something in a day they caught on one fishery right up on the north coast of scotland so there was a lot of fish there's a story i'm not actually found whether it's actually true enough there's always the stories told that the servants in London all went on strike because they refused to eat salmon more than three times a week because they were constantly fed on salmon it was regarded as a cheap food in the 1800s and it wasn't until the 1860s that they started putting restrictions on its catching. What I mentioned in the recommendation for holiday reading risk it reads like a travelogue as well as a composite biographical sketch of the British

fishermen is there a specific set of traits that you think connects these towns and the people who are still fishing using these older techniques no not really and the sad thing is there's not anybody fishing now you know they're all mostly gone most offshore fishing now is done by boat the few people who still do the traditional methods are doing it they're not allowed to catch the salmon the salmon has to be released back into the water and they just basically do it to keep the traditions alive they don't do it for any financial gain or whatever to be honest most of them are retired these days and they just do it because they enjoy doing it more than anything and they still have to pay a license fee even though they don't get any gain but if they catch

other fish they're allowed to take the odd sea trout or whatever but salmon has to go back in there's nobody doing it commercially any longer that all there's not a lot of fish in the REC any longer the herring's gone and what is being fished is being trawled but i mean there is fish there i've got on a it's an internet site here and they're they're fishermen and they put their catches which and two huge cod that he caught just here in the on the bristol channel so there's fish out there but a lot of it's closed areas anyway you can't trawl but there's certainly fish there you mentioned that the old ways a lot of that you've sort of laid at the feet of regulators but what other factors would contribute to that i understand what is causing the lack of fish based

on your previous answer but i think a lot of these people fish using these old ways because they like doing it and like preserving the tradition i mean what is causing what is causing the disappearance of those traditions and people don't want to do it anymore because it's usually the older people like well like me i suppose or whatever who interested they don't seem to care very much and society as a general doesn't seem to care very much about maritime traditions in this country i mean they talk to anybody well you don't talk to people in government because they're not interested they just don't they just ignore it and it's all just swept under the carpet so there's no interest nationally on it and yeah everybody's getting old most of the fishermen i know i met are all 50s 60s

70s and very rarely there are a couple of cases i have to say there are a few cases where young blood has come into it i know i went tripping on western super mare with a guy there and he's he'd been doing it with his father and he did tell me his son who is teenager was really interested as well and he would go and help and he really got into it but it's few and far between you know those kids need to be nurtured into it otherwise most people if they see something that is a bit of work and you have to get wet and you go out in horrible weather stand in a river for no gain at all would say well no sod that you know i go and play my computer or whatever i'll go at the pub you know i'm not going to do that why would i want to do that so that's why they're all

disappearing and are any of these methods being memorialized or captured in a way by museums or is it pretty much all just in your book there's a few museums you go around who have little bits they might have a net hanging on the wall or whatever but there's not very much no there's a tiny little bit in the corner in a local museum with a little plaque on the wall that sort of says oh this is a lave net or whatever but the lave netters themselves who i was talking about before who fish under the second crossing of the river seven they had their own little museum which they would open up they would come and fish during the season and they'd open up their little um room that they had and that was a that was a fantastic museums and in its own being you know and people

would come there and it would be open every time they fish but now of course they're not fishing so it's not open so they don't have open days they don't have schools going down there not only have the authorities stopped the fishing they've stopped people learning about the traditions of it and they were great down at that uh the black rock lake netters a lovely little setup down there and the other thing that the regulators don't realize is the fishermen are the guardians of the water they know what's going on they know if there's pollution they know if there's a problem here but that's all gone it's not there any longer because the authorities don't care and that's probably why we got raw sewage poured into the rivers it's basically profit before people you

know that's what's happening with the sewage it's lack of investment over many many many years by these privatized companies that all the profits are all going abroad well it sounds to me like there's more than enough material there to have a full museum of the british fishermen somewhere there should be yes you're quite right there should be there was a national fishing museum in grimsby i think it's still there actually but that's only involved in deep sea fishing it's not really interested in them localized traditional methods of salmon and whatnot so sadly no it's not there really i'm not sure how much interest would be in it even if there was obviously there's Some people are interested in it.

Otherwise, the publisher wouldn't have taken me on, I guess. Yeah, taken you on 27 times. Well, different publishers, but yeah, that's true, yeah. Well, unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Mike Smiley. Mike, where can we find you online, and what is the next project that you're working on? Well, I've been doing...

Last year, I did one on the boat builders up in Fraserboro, and I'm doing another one on another family of boat builders on Fraserboro, and that's coming out next August. but in the meantime my next project hopefully is going to be looking at shellfish so it'll be again in shore fisheries that's the plan well thanks so much mike to the listeners thank you for tuning in we'll see you next time Thank you. We'll be right back.