The Manx Legacy

Divers are a privileged section of society.  We have been places and seen things that even the most avid watcher of TV nature documentaries will not have noticed.  I’m guessing that not many film crews have hung out in Wraysbury trying to film pike, but anyone who has dived there has usually spotted at least one, especially if you go for the ‘circumnavigation around the lake’ dive.  The cost of underwater filming and the limited number of minutes or seconds of screen time mean that what the non-diving public see of diving is massively limited. In some respects it’s the equivalent of trying to infer the whole picture in a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle by looking at just one piece of it.  Try watching the documentaries made about the filming of wildlife programmes and you’ll end up feeling massively sympathetic to the cameraman who spent 3 months sat up a tree to get 30 seconds of edited footage. 

A few years ago we worked with the Fish Fight team led by TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.  Hugh has been incredibly successful in campaigning against discards, the massively wasteful practice of throwing back the fish that are over quota as, even though the fish are dead, they can’t be legally landed.  This campaign has been fought at EU level where the fisheries policies are set.  I suspect a large number of people were surprised to find out that this even happens, as like most fishing practices it is ‘out of sight’ and therefore ‘out of mind’ too.  That series of Fish Fight programmes moved the argument on a little and looks at sustainable fisheries management, which was why the team headed for the Isle of Man, although we are a small island in the middle of the Irish Sea, we punch above our weight when it comes to looking after our marine resources.

To understand how this situation has developed you will need a little oceanography, a little history and a little politics.  The Isle of Man is a Crown Dependency (a bit like the Falklands but without the threat of invasion) and we have our own laws and govern ourselves.  For political reasons we are not directly part of the EU, but are represented at that level by Westminster.  So within the EU rules we can do what we like with our territory which for the most part is 12 miles offshore.  Over a hundred years ago Liverpool University set up a field station in Port Erin to study all things marine.  The site was carefully chosen as the confluence of warm southern waters and cold northern waters means that the Isle of Man is probably one of the most biodiverse sections of the British Isles.  Port Erin Marine Lab operated until 2006 when research was relocated to Liverpool to save money. However, many of the scientists remained on the Island and took up government funded roles, set up consultancies or became involved in charities with a marine focus. The legacy of the Marine Lab continues in our fisheries management.

The closed area outside Port Erin Bay was the first area in which scallop dredging and trawling was banned and within 4-5 years it was already possible to show that catches outside the area were on the increase. Nearly 30 years of closure means that the seabed looks as it should look, three dimensional, with tall seaweeds, seafans and hydroids galore.  The data from Port Erin is cited all around the world and has been globally used in the arguments for closing sea areas to damaging activities.  But that’s not all, we have restricted fishing seasons, restricted engine sizes, minimum landing sizes based on the reproductive ages of the scallops, a further four closed areas and active fisheries protection officers.  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall wanted to see all of this in action and ask why a small island of 80,000 people could still have a sustainable scallop industry when areas in England and Scotland had been fished to extinction.