Gone Fishing Sea Fever

# Now is the time for fishing

# If you mean to have a try

# Get your tacklin' ready It's no use to keep them dry

# Shoot your nets out on the briny

# And haul them in again

# And you'll get a funny shimmer

# In the morning. #

SEA SHANTY ON ACCORDION PLAYS

It was night and it was dark and there was about ten men

who would just pull these nets manually back across the rail.

The lights of the boat were like sparkling diamonds

and that's when I realised I was hooked on the fishing.

There was a certain magic, still is, about it.

As an island nation, fishermen have always been

an important part of Britain's heritage.

For centuries, in an environment tinged with danger and promise,

fishermen have fought to bring home the sea's riches.

There was ling, cod, skate,

turbot, conger, dogfish - every fish you could think of.

In the early years of the 20th century,

catches were good and fishermen could make a living.

But as the century unfolded, a revolution in technology took place.

More and more fish were caught and stocks plummeted.

While some fishing communities survived, others went to the wall.

I started on that ship as a 15 year-old boy.

And then, I'm seeing a tug towing it away, to go to scrap.

It hurt. It hurt a lot to see that happen.

Many of these changes were filmed,

sometimes by fishermen themselves,

and through their home movies and their memories,

we'll discover how the revolution unfolded

and what life is like now for Britain's fishermen.

The fishing vessel, the Crystal Sea, is out hunting for white fish off the shores of Cornwall.

The brothers, David and Alec Stevens share the skippering on board their family-owned boat.

'We've a good working relationship. Worked together for as long as we can each remember,'

so I wouldn't really want to be doing it without my brother.

The job's a lot easier when there's two of you at sea to help each other

in the many things you have,

so we are glad to be working together.

David and Alec and their crew are a rare breed.

Once, people like them were the mainstay of fishing communities up and down the country.

But the dramatic decline in the fish stocks has seen the numbers of fishermen themselves fall sharply.

The Stevens family comes from St Ives, in Cornwall.

It's a place with a long tradition of fishing.

The town has always been a magnet for tourists and artists,

attracted by the light and its setting on the coast.

And by the 1930s, visitors were bringing cine cameras with them,

recording all aspects of local life,

including the thriving fishing industry.

The fish used to be laid out on the lifeboat slip.

They'd lay out small plaice, big plaice, turbot and then there used

to be a man who used to come with a bell and he would ring the bell

and everybody used to come round.

Then he would start the pricing. "Give me half a crown" for this line of fish or that line of fish.

It was hard to get any money for fish in them days.

People were very poor. Very hard going, all the time.

This was a world that Donald Perkin knew well.

Just like his father and older brothers before him,

Donald was to follow his family into fishing.

They got me an oilskin and sea boots

and I would say I was 14 years old. I didn't want to be a fisherman.

And I wish I had never seen the sea the first time.

While the men was eating, I was bringing mine up over the side.

Sick, first time at sea.

While Donald's family, like all St Ives fishermen,

hunted a whole range of fish,

shoals of pilchards had, for generations, been an important part of their catch.

Well, the pilchard fishery was essentially a big export fishery.

It relied on the Catholic countries,

mainly Italy, but certainly the Mediterranean countries,

who were looking for stocks of fish to eat through the Lent period.

The fish were caught, cured with salt,

packed up in barrels and exported in sailing ships.

When you get into the 20th century, sail is giving way to steam and then motorboats.

Mounts Bay was full of pilchards in them days.

I was in a boat over there called Esperion and we had to cut the nets away, we had so much pilchards.

I forget how many we used to carry.

I suppose about 15 nets, 150-yard-long nets.

And meshes, small mesh nets, where the pilchard used to go in and then they would fasten the net.

In these years between the wars, St Ives bustled with activity connected to fishing.

There were boat builders, basket makers, fish sellers and people making and repairing nets.

Years ago, when we were youngsters,

the older men used to mend all the gear

and they were called shore captains,

that was their job. When the fishermen were at sea,

they would sort the gear out.

Now, everything is cut out and the ropes are sent down.

There is no mending of this stuff, as such, now.

Chris Care is one of the few remaining net-setters in Cornwall.

This net is for wreck fishing.

Off the coast here is masses of wrecks, and this is for

wreck fishing, for fish like pollock and ling and coley, basically.

When I get the net in the packet, it is 200 yards long.

When I put on the rope, it's 117 yards.

That gives the slackness in the net.

If you had it too tight,

like that, the fish would not mesh.

You have slackness in the net, so when the fish go into the net,

their gills get stuck and that is how you catch them.

Fishermen all round the coast were subject to the elemental forces of the sea and the weather.

Theirs was dangerous work, and religion was always

an important bedrock for these isolated communities.

It was very religious here. St Ives men would never put their boats out on a Sunday, not out in the bay.

I was brought up with a Christian family, but I was a bit of a black sheep, I think.

I used to have a drink now and again on the quiet,

and then go down and wash my mouth out with saltwater before I went home, so Mother wouldn't smell me!

As well as the chapels, fishermen's lodges were part of the fabric of local life.

They were a haven, where fishermen could rest, plan and talk amongst themselves.

Gossip, all right. They'd tell you what's what,

and who stole this, and who didn't steal this, and who gave fish away and who didn't give fish away,

and whose wife was carrying on with who and who wouldn't.

If we was in here and a woman wanted her husband, she would never come in through the door.

She'd open the top door,

like that, and shout in,

"Dick, Fred," whoever she wanted. But they'd never come in here.

They would never come in here.

The same as aboard a boat - a woman wouldn't go aboard a boat.

She would shout to her husband, but they wouldn't allow her to board the boat.

Men thought it was bad luck, I suppose.

They would never start a season on a Friday, cos they reckoned that was bad luck.

Vicar coming down the quay, that was out.

And there was a certain furry animal that lives in a burrow,

with big ears - they would never mention them. They were very bad luck.

And you weren't allowed to whistle at sea, cos you were whistling for the wind.

Definitely no pasties.

Pasties was out.

I remember, the summer it was, going to sea and next thing,

thi youngster took his pasty out, and I shouted, "Hey, what are you doing with that?"

And the skipper, Ron, jumped, he thought somebody had fallen overboard.

I said, "Look, he's got a pasty. Bad luck."

He's like, "Ah, don't be so silly."

And within ten minutes, there was a big bang,

the hydraulic pipe burst and we drained out all the hydraulic fluid.

I said, "I told you. Pasty."

St Ives was just one of hundreds of coastal communities

around Britain that were making a living from the sea.

Across these communities, from the tip of Cornwall to the eastern shores of Scotland,

people were recording their lives and work on film.

You've got to have an eye for photography, if you like.

I seemed to have a natural eye for it.

And you'd be looking to record as close as you could

the method being used.

We used to think the skipper's job was an easy job,

cos he had one hand hanging on the wheel

and another hand using a camera.

Donald was just a boy when his father first filmed him on the family boat.

When I was six and first went out to sea,

it was to the drift net fishery, which was on its last years, really.

My memory of it was arriving at the fishing grounds,

the crew putting buoys onto different parts of the nets.

There was a big, heavy rope at the foot, and they just lay it to the tide

for hours and hours on end.

In fact, they stopped the engine. I found that really scary.

I couldn't sleep then, cos there was this creaking noise -

an old wooden boat working itself to death, I thought.

It was at night and it was dark,

and there was about ten men who had to stand and use pure muscle

and pull these nets manually back across the rail.

And as they came across the rail, there was the herring

stuck in the meshes, and they shook the nets, and the lights of the boat were like sparkling diamonds.

That's when I realised I was hooked on the fishing,

cos there was a certain magic, still is, about it.

When I was watching him when it was windy, he was unable to lift

the whole basket, but he was taking fish out of the basket and then putting them down into the hold.

A chip off the old block,

I would say.

Donald Sr is one of a long line of Anderson fishermen

from the port of Peterhead, on the north-east coast of Scotland.

His grandfather began working life as a whaler.

I spent a lot of time in my grandfather's house.

I used to listen to all these stories, and he stowed

away in a whaler going to Greenland, in one of the casks they kept the blubber in.

My father went to sea with me for nearly 30 years.

My father taught me all about the fishing, the working side of the fishing.

We went to the same church and...

Well, he just fancied me, that was it!

I always say there's only two things could ruin a fisherman -

a bad engine or a bad wife.

And if you couldn't trust your wife

as sure when you were at sea, you were in trouble.

When I got married,

it was just a different life.

He went out to sea and I stayed at home.

It was the herring. It was all the herring, then.

As this amateur film from the 1930s shows, herring was crucial to these communities.

The Anderson family was carrying on a long tradition of hunting the fish

as it shoaled along the coastal waters in huge numbers.

They would shoal off the coast of Shetland from, say, mid-June.

A little bit later, different shoals of herring would be worth

taking off the east coast of Scotland.

And so on and so forth, down the coast,

until you got to Yarmouth, when the Yarmouth herring shoals

were really at their peak in the autumn.

As early as medieval times, a principal means of catching herring was by drift nets.

These were curtains of nets that hung in the sea.

You used to have a fleet of about 86 to 90 herring nets.

You used to just drift with the tide

and the herring used to swim into the nets.

It usually took you about 20 minutes to shoot the nets

down before a wind, and then if you got a big catch of herring, it could

take you anywhere between 12 to 14 hours to haul in.

In the early years of the 20th century, the herring trade was

booming, and fleets landed catches throughout the east-coast ports.

Some of the herring went to make kippers, a popular breakfast food from late Victorian times.

The fish were processed in smokehouses in and around the harbours.

# Come a' ye fisher lassies Aye, come awa' wi' me

# Fae Cairnbulg and Gamrie And fae Inverallochie

# Fae Buckie and fae Aberdeen and a' the country roon

# We're awa' tae gut the herrin' We're awa' tae Yarmouth toon. #

But most of the herring caught by these fleets was salted and exported

to countries in eastern Europe, where the fish was part of the staple diet.

Thousands of women, mostly from Scotland,

followed the fleets, to gut and pack the fish that the men had landed.

My mother was a fisher, she used to gut the herring.

They gut it in Peterhead, then they went to Yarmouth.

When the boats went to Yarmouth, they went to Yarmouth with the boats and gutted.

They slit the herring up to cut the gut, put it away and then threw the herring into the barrel.

My mum and her sister, they were the gutters.

My aunt was the packer. She packed the barrels.

When you went in, you just saw them all in a row,

gutting the herring, and the other ones away packing.

They were happy when they were working, strangely enough.

It depended how much herring was in.

# And you'll wish the fish Had been a' left in the sea

# By the time you finish guttin' herrin' on the Yarmouth quay. #

Home-movie makers in Peterhead and St Ives were using film to record everyday life.

But in Hull, Britain's biggest fishing port, filming life at sea had an altogether different purpose.

Ship owners wanted to improve the efficiency of their fleets, and they

employed scientists and engineers with film cameras, to document working practices aboard the ships.

This is the camera that I used.

I've managed to resurrect it.

It's an old Bolex, clockwork-driven and, surprisingly, I think it still works.

Alan Hopper, seen here 50 years ago in the blue bobble hat,

was an engineer with expertise in the construction and repair of trawlers.

There was winches running in, there were wires with heavy strains on them, and he used to stand up

on the fo'c'sle head there with his camera, recording everything...

for his records.

I used to think to myself, "Cor, is he going to be safe up there with all these wires swinging around?"

Ken Knox was a skipper aboard some of the trawlers on which Alan filmed.

It's funny how you get scientists and people coming from ashore mixing with the deckhands and the crew.

You used to think, "Don't get in the way, don't upset them."

But they did a good job, and we can still sit and see them films of us both working

on technology, and making the fishing industry a better one,

and fish coming onto the market in a better state.

Unlike the small-scale family businesses of Peterhead and St Ives,

Hull was dominated by big fishing companies.

Hull and Grimsby were large fleet owners.

10, 20, 30 boats per owner,

and they were organised in a much more commercial way.

I think that is the essential difference - the capital nature

and the business ethos of what was a relatively new business.

Hull and Grimsby were basically from the 1850s, brand new ports,

literally, created because the railways were there to carry fish.

The St Andrews fish dock opened in 1883 and by the 1930s,

Hull and Grimsby had become the biggest fishing ports in the world.

The dockside was like a bustling village, with every trade imaginable.

Hull was a product of the 19th century industrial revolution in the North of England.

Its fish fed the rapidly expanding workforce in the textile, steel and mining areas.

In its heyday, more than 50 fish trains would leave the port each week

and much of the white fish - cod and haddock - was destined for the fish and chip trade.

Between about 1840 and 1880 somebody, and we don't know who, really, put fish with chips.

The fish and chip shop was created.

You could argue that fish and chips was the first fast food and certainly many of the first places

that utilised fish and chips and fish and chip shops were places like the textile district

in Northern England, where both man and woman was out at work

and a cheap, nutritious form of food was important.

So there suddenly developed a mass market for fish.

To meet this huge demand, Hull and Grimsby's fishing companies

found a way a way of using their large fleets more productively.

They organised their ships into what became known as boxing fleets.

The people who worked on those fleets were some of the most

skilled fishermen and seafarers of their age, or indeed any age.

How a boxing fleet would work, it would sail out to a fishing ground,

and what they did it was, every day when they caught fish, they packed it in boxes and then transferred

that fish to fast steam cutters, that ran the fish into Billingsgate in London.

But by the 1930s, stocks of fish in the North Sea were beginning to decline.

The success of box fleet fishing would have far-reaching consequences for Hull's fishing industry.

But for the fishermen at the time, there was a more pressing concern -

how to deal with the harsh conditions of the North Sea.

I was 15 in the April

and I joined the ship in the January, so I was only just 15.

We sailed from Hull and there was

the beginnings of snow when we sailed, I remember that.

Robert Rowntree worked on one of the last boxing fleets, just before the Second World War.

You used to gut the fish and wash it and put it in the various...

Medium haddock, small haddock, small cod, and put them in boxes.

Then the next day, you would get all these boxes, put them in the boat

and row them back to the carrier.

They were heavy boats, very heavy boats, not like an ordinary ship's lifeboat.

You would take the boat into the carrier, tie your boat up,

and then when you got on the deck of the carrier,

the bow of the boat came up, whoever was in the boat, like me,

used to get the box and lift it as best we could.

They were only five stone boxes, so they weren't always full, anyhow.

He used to pull it up onto the bulwark and get the box

and he would then transfer the box to the hold.

It could be pretty dangerous. We lost a lot of men

through the boats, because...

I don't know whether... When you go to sea and you think it's flat calm,

if you are there in a little boat, it is not so flat calm, it's more of a wobbly, wavy sort of thing.

I could hardly see over the gunwale of the boat.

I can remember a very old friend of the family,

he was in one of the boats going back as we were going back.

He was passing me and he said, "That will fix you all right, Robert, will it?"

I could hardly speak!

Robert Rowntree's experience of danger was shared by fishing communities throughout Britain.

Fishing was always one of Britain's most dangerous occupations, and this

made it hard for wives and mothers, like Liz Anderson in Peterhead.

I used to worry if it was rough at all or if the forecast was bad.

I used to be glad to see them coming in, because you just worried

and you didn't know what would happen.

I never had any fear of the sea.

I respected the sea, but I was never afraid of the sea.

I would look at the coal miner going down underground.

I would have been scared to do that.

Or if you see the steeplejack going up, climbing up steeples,

I would be scared of that, but not at the fishing.

I can remember coming through the Caledonian Canal on one of my boats

and I really thought I wouldn't see my wife and family again.

It comes down to faith.

Danger was a constant problem, but there were others that fishermen found less easy to predict.

The wider economic and political conditions

in which they found themselves could have devastating consequences.

For herring fishermen, like Donald Anderson's family,

the years after World War One were particularly harsh.

After the First World War,

and the Russian Revolution that accompanied it,

Russia was effectively no longer a large-scale market

for herring caught in Britain.

Similarly, in eastern Europe, many of the newly-independent

countries were keen to develop their own herring industries.

The kipper becomes less popular, as people turned to breakfast cereals in the 20th century.

Again, all these sort of features lead to a decline in the herring

industry which hangs on there, but gradually becomes smaller and smaller and less important.

Many went out of business, and Donald Anderson was one of the few left fishing for herring.

He managed to survive by innovating and taking risks.

In the 1960s he changed his catching methods, from drift, to the more efficient purse, nets.

When I decided that I would go to the purse net fishing,

the whole of the north-east of Scotland said that I was crazy.

The net, whose underside was closed, or pursed, surrounded the shoals.

The fish were trapped, then scooped out and into the boat.

Pursing meant that more fish could be caught on each trip than by using the older drifting method.

I often heard people saying, "This is the way my father did it.

"This is the way my grandfather did it."

I used to say, "No, not necessarily so."

I was always looking for better ways to do things.

Off the shores of Cornwall, brothers David and Alec Stevens

are using trawl nets to catch their quarry - shoals of white fish.

We tow nets, we're trawling.

Sometimes we work one net, sometimes we work two.

They brush the surface of the seabed and we create a sand plate, that is what we do.

We come to the end of watch after four hours. We haul our nets and hopefully we'll have a good catch.

This is film of the Sweet Promise,

their grandfather's boat in the 1950s,

shot by a local home movie maker.

To catch white fish in those days, the family used a different technique - long-lining.

Long lining was being introduced throughout Cornwall

as an alternative to the mackerel drifters.

This is where you shot up to six or seven miles

in the extreme cases of long line,

with multiple hooks attached all along its length.

When you're shooting the lines, that was the most dangerous.

If a hook caught in your arm or caught in your jumper

you would shout out fast.

Now where the wheelhouse was,

there were always three knives there on a piece of leather.

The nearest man would catch hold of that knife and cut the ossel.

Men did get them in the arm sometimes, but then you would cut the ossel

and he has still got the hook in his arm, but his life is all right.

Donald worked for the Stevens family in the 1950s and he was aboard the boat on the day it was filmed.

It was to be 60 years before he saw the film.

That's me gaffing the rays in.

Working alongside Donald was David Stevens, the skipper's son.

-I used to do all the gutting, that's to take home, that is.

-That's me.

That's you, David...

not very old there.

-12, 13.

-Big rays, too.

-Good rays.

We had a big shot of rays down there, I think it was 300-odd stone.

There was a lot of rays in them days.

Were you in the punt with father when the punt sunk?

No. Jim Mathers was.

I would never have been in a punt, I was always on deck throwing the rays in.

I was down aboard the boats from being about four, five years old.

All the time. Father was there working.

When you were home from school you would be down around the harbour

and down around the boats.

That day, the boat was landing, so I had come down

just like you do as a youngster, you thought you were helping a lot.

I would have thought it was summer time and I was off school.

You'd know David was going to be a good fisherman because he was interested in everything

that was going on.

He would be looking over the side telling you what fish was coming,

"Oh, there's a ray coming", or this coming or that coming.

I think he would have left school at 12 years old if his father would have let him.

He would be in the wheelhouse looking at the compass

and doing things and sculling the punt and stuff like that.

He was a boy that was always interested in fishing.

The first time I took the boat away to sea, I was only 18.

My father was ashore, basically having kittens, and he was

down on the cliffs at Land's End waiting for us to come back.

That was the first time I took the boat to sea, but when my father died,

what I missed the most, I didn't have anybody to talk to.

If I had a problem or something wasn't going right, I had nobody to

come home, talk to and sort it out. Your mentor had gone.

-A conger, that is.

-That's you, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-Conger's were hard things to gut, weren't they?

-Oh, gosh.

Slippery as a devil.

In those days, the Sweet Promise would leave St Ives on a Monday, stay out all week

and return in time to land the fish for the market on Saturday morning.

The St Ives harbour empties of water with the tide

and sometimes the boats would have to wait hours in the bay.

That's out in the bay. Raymond and me. That's me there sleeping.

That's Len Phillipson's cart. He had a dog that used to go between the horse's hooves called Kyle.

-The horse was Rose, wasn't it?

-Rose.

-It had more ice creams than anybody.

-Yeah.

That's all ling or conger there, David.

You'd never be allowed to do that now.

No, it'd be unhygienic now. Everything used to be on the path.

The St Ives films show a small-scale fishing community,

a family affair, where the boats tended to stay close to home.

Alan Hopper, the marine engineer in Hull, filmed something quite different.

He was recording larger and larger trawlers,

travelling further and further out to sea, to hunt for increasingly scarce

shoals of white fish, like cod and haddock.

For these companies, staying close to Hull wasn't an option.

By the 1950s, the local fishing grounds had been so over-fished

that the low stocks were not worth pursuing.

Ken Knox, the trawler skipper, experienced these distant waters first hand.

We would sail here up the Humber, 23 miles from where we are now.

Although we started fishing in the North Sea,

as we developed and the ships got more modern,

more powerful, the further we could go away.

Of course, the richest fishing grounds for the cod, the haddock, was on the distant grounds.

Iceland being the nearest - three days. You could be fishing within three days.

Five days to Norway, to Spitsbergen,

and a bit further afield would be Newfoundland and Greenland, which would take five, six, seven days.

The North Atlantic has a reputation of its own

for bad weather.

Gales reaching to storms, and the further to the north you went,

the worse these conditions could get.

The conditions made life tough for the fishing crew and for Alan Hopper.

Of course, I was neither a cameraman nor a fisherman,

but I had been to sea and I had some experience of that.

I really found difficulty at times in bad weather.

When there was ice about and things like that, it could, kind of, get rather hairy.

Ice in itself was not too bad, but then you got a gale.

You had to send your men out on the deck in these dangerous conditions to chop the ice away

and keep the ship clear and seaworthy.

As the fish became ever more scarce, the companies drove constantly

to find ways of fishing more efficiently.

Alan and Ken were involved with one experiment that harked back to the boxing fleets of the 1930s.

Here's some transfer at sea, Ken.

-Yeah.

-You can see we're actually doing this in Iceland.

On this one, we had to try and come up with

a scheme to improve the quality of the fish coming back from Iceland.

A 23-day voyage meant that sometimes the fish were 15-17 days old, which is not the best.

So by transferring the first part of the catch

to a homeward bound trawler, that would allow the ship to carry on

and he would then take a quantity of fish from another vessel that had just come on the fishing grounds.

My job really was to try and work out the logistics of that,

the technology of how to do it, the use of these drogues,

the boxing itself, which in itself was an innovation.

If you remember, up until this time, we stowed all the fish in bulk.

And here's the fish room shots, where you can see them boxing again.

Typical Iceland cod. They're excellent.

However, these fish were highly prized not only by the trawler men from Hull.

As productive fishing grounds shrank, tensions grew, in a battle that would eventually

transform the fortunes of Britain's busiest fishing port.

The fact that distant water trawlers worked off the coast of many

other countries, created a long-term conflict.

That conflict was basically because many of these countries

wished to take control of the fishing stocks off their coasts.

They saw them as their resource.

This led, ultimately, to disputes, which manifested

themselves particularly in a series of Cod Wars.

The most famous of these conflicts was with Iceland.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the small, but fiercely independent,

country gradually extended its national fishing limits, to exclude foreign ships.

Its navy harassed those that encroached and tried to cut their nets.

In April 1974, an Icelandic gunboat skirmished with a Hull trawler,

and as recorded here by a BBC film crew, they collided.

Skippers on British ships were handed some unusual weapons.

In normal times, you'd get a small amount of pepper

and we went to sea and we found out we had a huge bag of pepper,

and the idea was to make pepper bombs to throw at the Icelanders.

-And of course...

-Would that have fended them off?

No, no, no.

It wouldn't have even reached them, I don't think.

-Then broom handles, these were our rifles.

-But not kill them?

Well, you couldn't kill them with a broom handle, could you, and a pepper bomb?

The last of the Cod Wars ended in 1976.

Under international pressure, the British government gave way

and British vessels could no longer fish within 200 miles of Iceland.

The distant water trawlers working out of Hull

lost their most important fishing grounds

and the industry went into steep decline.

It was a sorry sight to see when these ships were moored up there, not moving.

We happened to have on the River Humber, a couple of

very large ship demolition companies and you could see them slowly being towed down there and scrapped.

The Arctic Corsair, the last remaining Hull distant water trawler

is now a museum ship.

I remember one of my ships and I worked my way up

from galley boy, decky learner,

spare hand, third hand, fourth hand, bosun,

mate, skipper, and in between, two trips, cook.

I did every position on that ship.

Then I'm seeing a tug towing it away to go to scrap.

It hurt. It hurt a lot to see that happen.

Today, hardly a single fishing vessel comes in or out of Hull.

But next to the now derelict St Andrews fish dock, is a new state-of-the-art fish market.

The fish sold here have been caught by Icelandic fishermen in Icelandic waters.

They're brought in by road from a container port on the other side of the River Humber.

The old docks employed thousands of people.

The new fish market, just a handful.

Machines, not people, grade and sort the fish.

Alan Hopper, the engineer who filmed aboard distant water trawlers,

is a founder of this new market, and one of its directors.

This is my colleague, Orn Jonsson, he's from Iceland.

He works for a company called Atlantic Fresh,

which are the principle suppliers

of the fish to this market at this time.

It has changed, the Icelanders control their own waters now.

What's often referred to as the Cod Wars, where the Icelanders

were regaining the rights to their own waters.

Again, it's the same fish, but is caught now by us

and transported to the English market by ourselves.

We want to take care of our fishing stocks.

That's often why we say that the fishing in Iceland is sustainable and responsible.

As the stocks have gone down and we've learnt more about fisheries management,

it has become a greater and a more well-used science.

The Icelanders, from my experience, are very far ahead of most countries

in this whole business of stock management.

Let's face it, they've only got themselves to manage, whereas around

the European waters, we're dealing with six or seven countries, who all have got to be managed separately.

The Icelandic fish is sold here in a fully-computerised Dutch auction.

Prices start high and fall until a buyer reacts.

It's largely a silent affair.

The contrast with Peterhead, in Scotland, is startling.

4.10, 4.20,

4.20, 4.30...

£50, you're out, £50...

155, 155...

Here, the quayside fish market, one of the largest for white fish

in Europe, runs on more traditional lines.

140! 140!

And the bulk of the fish that comes to the market still arrives

in British boats, including the Anderson's boat, Glenugie.

Unlike Hull, Peterhead's fishermen never became dependent on fish caught in distant waters.

Donald Anderson held on to a family business and, in his son, he found a willing partner.

My mother was determined I was going to do well at school.

I could have done well at school, but I chose to be at school when I

had to be, and be in the harbour all the time if I could be.

It was a balancing act, to keep the teacher happy, my mother happy and me happy.

The harbour always won.

When I saw Donald was definitely going to go to the fishing, there wasn't a happier man in Peterhead.

I was very pleased

that he was coming in. It was more my term,

coming into the family business.

And once Donald Jr had got his skipper's ticket,

his father lost no time in sending him out to face his first challenge.

I remember him arriving in the house, my father had come in from sea.

I think it was Friday and he had just landed.

He said to me, "What's happening with you?

"Have you got that ticket yet?" I says, "Yes."

He says, "Right, you're taking the boat to sea on Sunday night."

We sailed on the Sunday evening.

Everybody was south-east of Peterhead, fishing off Sunderland.

We went down there and there was a huge, huge fleet of boats there.

Because of my father's reputation - he hardly spoke to anybody else

and was his own man - they sort of cast me aside.

It finished up a total disaster, because I went around

from Monday to Friday,

like, being behind the brush - too late!

So with no more a-doing, go home with our tail between our legs

and land on the Saturday morning was a complete disaster.

I thought. "That's it, that's my initiation.

My father, being the kind of man he is, he says,

"There's no point in me coming back until you've learnt how to do it."

So I was put back out the next week to do the same again!

I managed, I think, it was in the third attempt.

We were the talk of the town. We left on the Monday afternoon

and we were in the Thursday morning with a huge shot of cod.

I wouldn't be allowed to land that nowadays.

On the other side of the country, off the Cornish peninsula,

David and Alec Stevens are bringing their trawler home.

Their family has also seen big changes in fishing since the 1950s.

In those days, they would have landed the catch at St Ives,

but in 1969, the Stevens moved from the tidal harbour there to the deep-water harbour at Newlyn.

These days, very few fish from St Ives.

Then, the family could catch what it liked,

but that, too, has changed.

Over-fishing has led to severe restrictions.

If you think you're over fishing

an area or a particular stock, you need to do something about it.

One possible way is to impose a quota, which is the limit of

the amount of fish of that species that you can take out of the sea.

Right, let's get down here.

Officers of the Marine Fisheries Agency in Newlyn are carrying out a spot check

on the Stevens' boat, to ensure that they're sticking to the quotas.

-Right, so we've got dory here.

-Yeah, dory here.

A bit of a smaller run this time.

Getting to the end of the season for them now.

-That's er...

-Prime stuff, lemons underneath.

Lemons underneath there, OK.

'From '97 to now,'

you've seen vessels leaving the industry, as they found that they didn't want to carry on

and the quota was not enough for them.

The boats that wanted to carry on have bought the quota off

the vessels that have left and that's how the industry has contracted and consolidated.

'It was not a nice process, but it's been a necessary process.

'We had to be fishing sustainably and within our means, and we're getting there now.'

Well, in my opinion, the most threatened species

in the North Sea is fishermen. It's not the fish.

We can't shoot the nets and say we only want haddock.

We catch whatever's swimming in front in it.

We find that we have to dump good marketable fish over the side.

Someone who's running a boat in the industry now, it's a fine balancing act to keep viable.

Today, in the face of increasing regulation and declining fish stocks,

Britain's fishing community has had to adapt to survive.

The change in our relationship with one particular fish, the salmon,

illustrates just how adaptable it has had to be.

Salmon has been caught traditionally on its return to rivers

and estuaries from ocean feeding grounds.

In the 1930s, amateur film-makers recorded the popular bag-net method on the Isle of Skye.

And today, on the north coast of Scotland,

Jamie Mackay and his son Neil still fish

and repair their nets in the same way.

The fish come in here, follow its leader, who would be here in the sea,

and then they would come up in here through what we call the big door

and they would also swim around in this area for a time.

And then they would see this opening, where they would think there was an escape route.

And just swim around and around in there.

It's never really changed much in the hundreds of years that it has been running.

But something fundamental has changed.

Today wild salmon is a luxury item, for those with gourmet tastes and deep pockets.

Stocks of the fish, and the numbers of fishermen hunting them in the traditional way, have plummeted.

The new salmon fishermen don't need the traditional methods, because they no longer hunt salmon,

they farm them.

In these stacks of trays in a farm hatchery in Scotland,

hundreds of thousands of salmon eggs are being incubated.

My wife is actually a midwife at the local hospital in Fort William

and she quite often comes home

and says, "We've delivered one baby or two babies",

and she doesn't seem to agree with me, but I'll tell her

we've delivered 2.5 million today, so you've got it easy!

Essentially, in this hatchery, we take in a large batch of eggs once a year - about 2.5 million.

We then move them from the hatchery down to the tanks we see here

and we introduce feed from there. And it's from that point onwards we grow them on.

After about 15 months, the smolts, or juvenile salmon,

are transferred from the inland hatchery to the farms, usually found in lochs.

The industry might look new, but its origins go back a long way.

In many senses, we think of fish farming, rather than fish hunting,

as being a modern development. And yet, fish farming is very old.

Just look around Britain and you'll see the remains

of many medieval fish ponds, dotted across the country.

But today most UK salmon farming is concentrated in Scotland.

The manager of this farm, off the Isle of Skye in the west of Scotland, is Euan McArthur.

I've been working in the industry for 20 years.

The changes in the fish farming industry are colossal and we've gone

from six-metre wooden cages to, as you can see today,

24-metre steel pens.

We've doubled in size dramatically, and a lot more automation, as well.

It used to be all hand feeding.

You could be hand feeding one or two tonne a day.

Now, with the automatic feeding system, we have so much more control over our feeding.

I've been involved with crofting on the Isle of Skye since I was a child.

There's a major overlap from land farming - crofting - into fish farming.

At the end of the day, you're still farming livestock.

With arguments about pollution and the effects on wild fish stocks,

salmon farming is hugely controversial.

But fish farming is set to expand.

Scientists are exploring ways of farming a whole range of fish.

At the beginning of the 21st century, fish farming could pose

the final challenge to a community that has faced enormous upheavals across a century of change.

To face the challenge, Britain's remaining fishermen might need even more

of the spirit that has marked out families like the Andersons and the Stevens.

My son's three months old now

and I don't know if he's going to be a fisherman yet.

He hasn't told me yet, but when he does talk, I'll have a little chat with him and see if wants to.

The future could be really good.

So hopefully, by the time it's time for me to hang up my socks,

I'll have some young guys coming into the boat

that have got the same enthusiasm and the same will to do the job as I've always had.

One of the things that's carried me through the bad times in the fishing

is it's never been a job of work for me, it's been my hobby.

We've lost a large chunk of our merchant marine.

We've lot a large chunk of our navy.

I think to lose even more of our fishing industry

would be extremely detrimental to the future livelihood of what, after all, is an island nation.

# Then I'll get that cod fish with his great old head

# He said to the decky Get it, cast a lead

# Singing, windy old weather, boys Squally old weather, boys

# When the wind blow We'll all go together

# Then I'll get the haddock So sharp and so shy

# He said to the decky Hook on the lead guy

# Windy old weather, boys Squally old weather, boys

# When the wind blow We'll all pull together. #