Episode 8 Channel Patrol

It's the busiest waterway in the world.

Come on, skipper! Get a move on. That way.

A gateway to our nation.

Over 90% of the world's trade travels by sea.

It's not just TVs and refrigerators. It's everything around us.

Protected by a multi-agency task force,

it's a unique stretch of water.

This is warship Tyne, warship Tyne. Channel one-two, over.

-INAUDIBLE

-..Over.

It's very difficult to police the Channel.

To board every vessel's an impossible task.

It's a place where swimmers and Sunday sailors

fight for space with cruise liners...

..and cargo ships.

It's like trying to get across the M25 during rush hour.

For some, the English Channel is their place of work.

If my mum came out here and saw what I was doing up here,

-she'd tell me to get off straightaway.

-HE LAUGHS

For others, it's a playground.

Whoo-hoo!

-RADIO:

-This is the rescue helicopter...

But for those who venture onto its unpredictable waters...

We're just going to assist the moving of the casualty now.

-All controlled, over, lifeboat.

-..it can mean life or death.

Just drag him onto the boat!

I hope my babies get to see this, and see what Daddy does for a living.

HE LAUGHS

Today on Channel Patrol,

line fishermen battle rocky seas to get their catch...

I know three boats that have sunk out here,

bass fishing, that have all either hit things in the water,

or taken too much sea.

And that's it, they're in the water.

..border force sniff for contraband...

There could be a package in there.

It only takes one package, you know, it's £1 million worth of drugs.

Fast forward, thank you.

..and a crew of merchant seamen get pumping.

Our hose is six to eight inches diameter.

Your average car, we would fill it up with 50 litres

in one fifth of a second.

HORN

Over the centuries, the 29,000 square miles of the English Channel

have provided an abundance of fish such as cod, haddock and skate.

But in recent decades, their numbers have plummeted,

in part due to industrial scale fishing methods.

The UK and France currently land about 150,000 tonnes of sea bed fish

and shellfish a year,

compared to 51,000 tonnes in 1950.

In Weymouth, Dorset, skipper Ian Taylor

is passionate about using traditional fishing methods

to catch sea bass.

-All right?

-Yep, we're good.

-Let's go.

All the fish we catch are caught by fishing rods,

so it's a real sustainable, eco-friendly method of fishing.

We don't do any damage to the sea bed and we don't have anything

we catch that's undersize or the wrong species.

It's a real, simple way of fishing.

It's hard work. It's labour-intensive.

Ian and his anglers can make a decent living,

but it's a volatile and unpredictable line of work.

So far we've done two days and we haven't made a penny yet.

So the time is starting to get precious. So the pressure's on.

Intense rivalry between local fishermen only adds

to the stress of the job.

There's an awful lot of competition in bass fishing.

We put the time and effort in looking for the fish,

so as soon as we find the fish, we don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry

turning up and stealing it from us.

And it can make the difference in catching 200kg one day,

to catching 20kg the next.

We're talking thousands of pounds.

We talk to people we trust. We lie and cheat to everybody else.

And that's the rules.

Hole and line fishing catches naturally schooling fish,

which can be attracted to the surface using bait.

So the first step is for Ian to head two miles out to sea

to catch sand eels.

Basically, the sand eels live on the Shambles Bank.

It's really important to be able to be on the Shambles Bank ready

for catching bait at 11 o'clock, because the tide runs one way,

it runs up the English Channel, and then at a certain time of day

it will stop, and that's called slack water.

And they only come up out of the sand to feed

and do what they do on slack water.

So what we do is, we tow a little trawl behind the boat

and hopefully catch the sand eels, which we need for bait.

Basically I'm going to sit here now, see how the boat drifts, and then

I'll make the call when I think it's the right time to shoot the net.

And hopefully I'll be right.

That's us, and then these marks along here is where I've actually

marked the tow line where we're actually going to tow for the eels.

The wind alone will push you along nearly a knot,

so that means there isn't much tide running.

We could probably shoot away and tow. Right.

-I'm going to go for it, lads. Get yourselves ready.

-Right.

-Sorted.

Going out!

The net they use is lightweight

and causes minimal disturbance to the sea bed.

With the net released, Ian now has to carefully move the boat off.

If you go too fast, your net will pick up too far off the bottom

and you won't catch anything.

If you go too slow, it will jam in the bottom and then

you're in a world of pain because you've got to try to get the trawl

out of the bottom.

With the crew already down on wages, this could be devastating.

The trawl costs about £1,500 for the trawl set-up,

so you don't really want to lose it.

-Shall we go?

-Go.

After trawling for 20 minutes, the net has picked up shingle

and could get stuck on the sea bed.

Sometimes it digs in, and then you've got to be quick,

otherwise you pull the whole lot in and you get a massive ball

of shingle and it costs a lot of money, and a lot of time and effort.

And you don't get no bait. It can be an endgame.

THEY HEAVE

-Got it?

-Yeah.

One, two, three, go.

They've got to pull up the net without tearing it,

and without losing any bait they might have caught.

-It's all right, mate.

-All right?

-Their luck is in.

We've got here all blacks and needles, but we've got some.

-Has it all come out straight?

-Yeah, it's fine, mate.

-Well done.

Yeah, get a half or something.

-Haven't done too bad, have you?

-A lot of needles.

-A lot of needles.

-A few longs.

We've got enough for today, yeah?

We've definitely got enough for today. A few nice greenies in there.

-There's quite a lot here, actually.

-Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

We've done all right. That's what we're after.

That's a lovely green sand eel. That's like curry to a bass.

So what we do now is basically sort out the decent eels

amongst all the needles, what we call needles, which are baby sand eels,

which we throw back and hopefully will survive.

If you take all that out,

then you're not going to have anything to catch next year.

This is basically what allows us to have a proper bass fishing industry,

the amount of sand eels that are here.

So this lot are no good to us, so we put them all back.

And they'll carry on to be big sand eels next year.

Well done.

Having caught the bait,

the crew can now head further out to sea to begin fishing.

On a normal day we'd like to clear 100kg of fish.

We get an average price of £10 a kilo, so that's about £1,000.

But obviously we've got fuel to come out of that,

we've got wages to come out of that, wear and tear.

I mean, this is a £200,000 boat, so you've got big overheads to cover.

If you don't catch fish, you don't earn any money.

That's the way it is.

Hopefully, the bass will be here this afternoon.

There you go.

Go on, then.

Today I just hope we just start to catch a few fish,

just to know that they are starting to feed around the area.

Fingers crossed.

Really I should have a rod in my hand as well,

but I won't bother till they start catching.

It's not long before a sea bass takes the bait.

Whoo-hoo!

Dave's got a fish. Go on, David!

Unlike large-scale fishing methods, line fishing enables the crew

to specifically target small amounts of fish.

Now they know the fish are biting,

Ian wants to reposition the boat and drift over the area on the tide

so they can maximise their chances of a good catch.

Basically there's a hump here, and the fish are on top of the bank.

So we drift the boat over the top of the hump,

and that's where we're catching them.

So the secret is to keep the drifts as short as possible.

So it's all about having a fast boat, a fast team, and being quick, really.

Most of my team are getting too old, so they're not that fast any more.

Got to get some newer ones next year.

I got my rod back, yee-hah!

It's probably been ruined, cos Bazz has been touching it.

Argh!

That's the bottom.

The crew needs to catch 20kg each a day to make a decent wage.

Really, after the last couple of days, anything would be nice.

Just to know it's going to start fishing would be nice.

It's always a struggle to pay your rent, feed your family.

But that's what we choose to do, I suppose,

and that's part of the parcel of fishing.

The swell has picked up, making for a rocky ride.

It's pretty dangerous when it gets rough.

You need to be aware of what everybody's doing, really,

to be safe.

I know three boats that have sunk out here, bass fishing,

that have all either hit things in the water,

or taken too much sea, had a wave over the boat...

Like that one! HE LAUGHS

And that's it, they're in the water. Luckily, all the three boats I know,

there were other boats around them fishing,

and they actually rescued the people.

I think one of the times they actually stepped off

as the boat was sinking.

But it can be a very dangerous place to be.

Due to overfishing in the Channel, hitting the 20kg mark has become

more difficult for Ian and his crew with every passing year.

There's a fish now. It's a small one.

-Come on, Jeff, get it in.

-We've got it.

Even when a bass is caught, it still has to meet certain criteria.

It's a small fish, this could be close to the legal size.

We've got to keep up with regulations,

and check legal sized fish...

..with a measuring unit.

Basically from the tip of the nose,

as long as the tail is overhanging the back of the measure,

then it's a legal fish.

The catch just scrapes in above the 36cm minimum.

It's probably earned me about £1.50.

But after nearly an hour on the sandbank, with only two bites,

Ian has to think tactically.

It's not really fishing here very well,

so you've got to make a decision whether you stay here and see

if it gets any better, or you go and try somewhere completely different.

If you go somewhere completely different that's no good,

then you've had it. That's you done.

There's a massive gamble for the next three hours,

trying to find whatever we can find, or cut our losses,

steam 10 miles to a new mark, and see if that fishes.

But the trouble is, where we're going to go, if we go down there,

if there isn't fish there,

then we might as well just turn round and go home.

We're going to move to a different position, different place.

This is dreadful.

Disaster day.

Weather's rubbish, the fishing's rubbish.

It's all rubbish.

Ian now has a 45-minute journey before he finds out

if his gamble has paid off.

In the UK, we are dependent

on maritime trade for the country's prosperity.

Over 90% of the world's trade travels by sea.

Each year, £524 billion worth of goods come in to us

through our ports, including half of all our food.

The breakfast you had this morning probably came by sea.

If it was a banana on toast, for example,

that banana's come in on a ship from the Caribbean.

Probably the cutlery and the plates,

and even the table you're sat at, has arrived by sea. So shipping is huge.

It's not just TVs and refrigerators, it's everything around us.

With such a huge flow of massive container ships

and boats coming in from all over the world, it is inevitable

that contraband, including counterfeit goods and illegal drugs

will be hidden and buried in amongst legitimate imports.

Something the UK Border Force are vigilant to.

In 2011, the team in Southampton seized the largest ever haul

of Class A drugs

when they discovered 1.2 tonnes of smuggled cocaine

with a street value of up to £100 million.

We get roughly 1.5 million containers arriving in this port

every year.

That equates to roughly about 39 million tonnes.

Sean Gigg is one of 20 officers trying to intercept the flow

of illicit cargo into Southampton,

home to the UK's second-largest container terminal.

We find various illegal goods that come into the UK.

That can be counterfeit goods, it's drugs,

but also excise goods such as alcohol

and tobacco products as well.

Detecting these illegal goods is a massive ongoing operation

for the Border Force.

We have a number of staff in, who we'll be deploying now

to look at the container ship which has just arrived,

look at the containers inside to make sure

there's nothing illegal inside those containers.

They use intelligence to make targeted searches,

but they also pull shipments off at random.

We're looking for a wide range of illegal commodities,

that's anything from Class A drugs, Class B drugs and Class C drugs,

all the way from counterfeit goods, but also foodstuffs as well.

So we're going to have a closer inspection of that.

It says on the manifest it's rice products,

but we want to have a good look inside to make sure that

it IS rice products, and nothing else that shouldn't be in there.

With such a large volume of cargo coming into Southampton, the search

for contraband can be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

A container's been selected for us to have a good examination,

because of the sheer size, and we don't know the goods inside.

What we're going to use is our X-ray vehicle here, and that will

give us the capability to look inside that, in the container.

It operates pretty much similar to an airport scanner

when they select baggages, and that goes through that.

But on a larger scale.

The scanner will go up and down the container, then give us

an image representation of what's inside.

There may be an area of concern, and that's the bit we need to look at.

So an item where it's fairly dense, like rice,

there could be a package in there.

It only takes one package, you know, it's £1 million worth of drugs,

concealed in a 40ft container.

Every major port such as here, Portsmouth and Felixstowe,

and also Dover, will have something this big.

We can't scan every single container,

it's impossible for us to do that task.

When you've got a container ship with 3,000 containers,

it's impossible.

So having something like this is a very valuable tool.

So it makes our job a little bit easier

when trying to combat smugglers, but also the general criminals as well,

trying to bring their stuff in illegally into the UK.

The X-ray on the container's contents gives a conclusive result.

The image has come out all clear, and our officers are happy

that there's nothing in there that should be of interest to us.

So what's going to happen now, that container will go back

in its stack and wait to be collected by the company.

Another invaluable member of the Border Force patrol team

here at Southampton is four-year-old Eli.

We get the dogs involved if maybe an area which requires

-closer inspection...

-Good boy.

We'll call our dog team in,

and we'll take a closer inspection inside,

with the dog unit, whose nose is always far better than ours.

This is Eli, the dog, and this is Mark, the handler.

Our dog is a spaniel. A very good dog.

He's multi-trained in all types of illegal commodities.

Anything from drugs to cash.

And so, yep, he's our primary dog to use now inside this container.

We've tunnelled out a little hole here, which will allow our dogs

to go inside and have a sniff right through the container itself.

There's two different types of products here, long grain rice

and some brown rice.

But as you can see, the depth of it makes it very, very hard

for our officers to have a good look inside,

and it's too time intensive to take off every single box.

The dog is absolutely fantastic here.

Up!

Eli performs over 20 searches a week.

Last year in Southampton a dog found £26,000 hidden

in the back-seat of a car.

As well as using detector dogs,

the force often use old-fashioned manpower to search boxes at random.

So, what we've got in here is branded products,

available, say, in branded stores and shops at the moment,

so we have these items here, all available in the UK.

But, as I say, these are counterfeit.

Here are some Diesel products, again very popular.

All counterfeit, all made in the Far East.

So these will be sold on street markets,

and also possibly car-boot sales. The quality is going to be poor.

It's not going to be tested, you know.

So the printer's ink may come off. It could be toxic, we don't know.

And we just have to take this stuff off, cos the protection is

not only for the public, but it's also for the companies themselves.

So we're coming up to September, and these are FIFA World Cup tops.

So they've completely missed the boat on that one.

Pretty pointless now.

But we also look for food products as well, banned,

coming into the UK from outside the EU.

Any foodstuffs that contain egg or meat-based products.

All the way here from the Far East, pork steaks, so they're pork ribs.

Milk-based products as well,

so this will be, like, chocolate powder and milk powder.

None of this will have gone through the Food Standards Agency at all.

A lot of people bring this in in commercial quantity,

or it could be people bringing stuff in just for that taste of home.

This will be up for destruction, simple as.

Because we don't know the quality,

we don't know the effects it could have.

It's just one of those products that's been banned.

So we need to just basically get rid of it.

Come on, then. Good lad.

Eli has sniffed around and hasn't found anything suspicious

in this container.

It's all legitimate rice products, but you never know.

If you don't look, you don't find.

But there's no rest for Eli, Sean and the rest of the force.

Smugglers operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So do we.

The super ships that stream up and down the English Channel

become larger, faster and more numerous year on year.

-RADIO:

-...103, good morning to you both.

Freighters and cruise liners can carry up to 14,000 containers,

or over 4,200 people.

These vast vessels need an extraordinary amount of fuel

to carry them on their global journeys.

Their gargantuan engines are as heavy as a small ship.

So filling them up isn't a one-man job.

Dedicated crews on board titanic oil tankers are the ship's

petrol pump attendants.

INAUDIBLE COMMAND

INAUDIBLE RADIO COMMAND

Captain John Pryor is master of the Whitonia tanker.

It's 7:25 in the morning.

Just coming into refuel the Emerald Princess.

What are we, 1,200 tonnes for this, Jack, is it?

1,200 tonnes, which is a typical amount for these guys.

It's probably going to last them a couple of weeks.

It's a regular customer of ours.

Refuelling a ship is not like pulling up at the petrol pump.

Advanced planning is required.

Agents working on behalf of the cruise liner

have booked in their refuel with the company's office.

Captain John's job is to get to the ship on time

and deliver the oil as quickly and safely as he can.

The ship itself is worth about £6 million,

and the cargo's around about £4 million, so there is

£10 million of ship and cargo manoeuvring alongside another vessel.

And of course the vessel you're going alongside, if it's a cruise liner,

it may be worth £400 million or £500 million.

So you need to be in a position where you can see everything

and be in complete control, which is why we go to the bridge wing,

where we get a better view of what's happening on the outside.

We're just coming alongside the Emerald Princess now.

Yeah, this is the bit that does all the damage if it goes wrong.

Where's his door on this one, then, Alec?

OVER RADIO:

What you're trying to avoid is metal-to-metal contact with anything.

Cos that could cause a spark.

-Eight metres eight. RADIO:

-Six metres six.

Six. I'll slow it down.

-Three...

-Three...

-Two metres two.

-Two.

A metre.

One metre.

In position. Thank you.

We carry 6,200 tonnes. We've got about...

..1,500 tonnes on board at the moment.

So we're nearly empty, to be honest.

Probably one more day and we'll be loading again.

Fast forward, thank you.

Before refuelling can begin, there is a formality to address.

Each time we moor up alongside,

there's a conversation between the engineer and the mate on here,

and they agree a contract of how fast he wants it.

And typically it's about 400 or 500 tonnes an hour.

It's a safety thing. You might have limited amount of staff

to watch his tanks coming up, or the vents on his tanks

may be restricted to a certain amount of flow.

So we agree a pumping rate,

and then we don't go over the rate that he specifies.

The contract is passed over to the cruise liner for the chief engineer

to review and sign.

The Emerald Princess has a busy schedule to keep to, with new

passengers and fresh supplies coming on board for the onward journey.

So refuelling is a time-critical operation.

We'll connect up a large hose,

very much like you put petrol in a car.

Instead of being a one-inch bore hose,

our hose is six to eight inches diameter.

Your average car,

we would fill it up with 50 litres in one fifth of a second.

So it's pretty fast.

The crew can't start to deliver the fuel

until the contract is signed, so all John and his team can do is wait.

So this is the azimuth room, down here...stroke gym.

That's what I say to the cadets, this is the emergency propulsion!

The crew spends 28 days living on the tanker,

-and is then released for 28 days' leave.

-That's the galley.

This is Janusz, our Polish chef for the day.

What are you making, Jan?

China...

Chinese? Very nice.

This is the crew mess.

This is where we all eat our dinners, lunches etc.

And this is a clean mess that we use,

just a games station

and a TV there for people to relax of an evening.

20 minutes after coming alongside, the crew is ready to pump,

but hasn't been given the go-ahead from the Emerald Princess.

Captain John and his crew could be delayed

reaching their other customers.

To be able to fill up as many ships as she does,

the Whitonia can carry over 6,000 tonnes of flammable material,

so the boat has to be prepared for the worst.

The fire triangle has three sides.

You've got to have heat, you've got to have fuel,

and you've got to have air, or oxygen.

So if you eliminate any one of them,

wherever you are, you can't have a fire.

So obviously on deck we've always got some fuel,

and you've always got oxygen as well.

So you have to eliminate the heat.

So you don't want anything that's going to create a spark,

like a mobile phone or whatever, or someone smoking.

So that's taken out of the scenario.

Firefighting room.

There's a tank here that holds concentrated foam.

If you have a fire on deck, you can pump water through there,

and this little pump injects foam into the line,

which expands at 3,000 to 1.

And you can cover the deck in 18 inches of foam,

which should eliminate your fire.

After 40 minutes, the contract is finally signed, sealed

and passed back to the tanker.

Pumping can now begin.

She's got the flow now.

In the first couple of minutes,

we need to give them a very slow rate

and they have to establish everything's OK on their tanks,

their line, everything is open, no-one forgot to close any valves.

And everything is OK.

Yeah, go ahead.

-RADIO:

-If you can increase the pressure on the black hole

-up to maximum, please.

-Yeah, break it up now.

The pressures are carefully monitored as the fuel is

pumped over.

Yeah, it's important to keep a very close eye on the discharge.

That's when the accidents can happen.

-RADIO:

-...Where he is is fine there, mate,

we've got the pressure we want.

As well as the safety concerns,

Captain John now has delays to contend with.

40 minutes later than I thought we were going to be.

Which is having a knock-on effect on the day.

Everything's gone back nearly an hour.

You can't pump faster because we're behind time,

and we end up with a longer day.

The refuelling goes without a hitch, and after two-and-a-half hours

the Emerald Princess is fully topped up and ready to go.

Everybody ready to go now, please.

Go, all right.

The chief signs a receipt.

He may ask if he gets any free glasses or tokens with his fuel,

but unfortunately we're not like petrol stations. We can't do that.

We'll transfer that and move on to the next job.

Just finished on the Emerald Princess. Paperwork completed.

And we're just away now.

Having lost time on the cruise liner,

they need to get to their next two jobs as quickly as possible.

Luckily for the crew of the Whitonia

the next on the list is just around the corner.

Change of orders.

Instead of going to Portsmouth this afternoon,

now we've got another job in the Empress Dock.

To help this giant ship negotiate around the different berths

of the container terminal,

Captain John has all the latest technology at his fingertips.

The ship is geared up for lots of tricky manoeuvring like that.

You've got twin azimuth units here, they go around 360 degrees,

and there's two of them on the after end.

As many times as you like, they're all hydraulically controlled.

I can link everything through into a joystick,

and if I want to go diagonally I go like this.

I can alter the heading by rotating like that. BEEPING

It's probably easier than parking a car, to be honest.

-Watching the stern, Lofty? RADIO:

-All right, mate.

OK, we're just coming up towards the auto bay on 105 berth.

So what I'm going to do is lose some speed, and then swing to port.

To get alongside the next ship safely,

John is going to have to reverse past this 100-metre-long vessel.

If you have any failures, there's plenty of room out there,

so I've got time to recover, I've got time to drop my anchor

if I was to lose the engines or anything like that.

Not that that ever has happened.

But you have to think, "What's the worst thing that can happen?"

So I'm now at a point where I can't really see what's going on

from in here.

So I'm going to transfer out to the bridge wing...

..where I get a better view.

The awkward thing on this boat is we have to come in, and the stern does

have to get quite close in there,

and there's no fender in between us.

So it's critical that we're not going to fast when we get there.

Metal-to-metal again, possible damage, possible spark.

All to be avoided.

'When the ship's light, we haven't got much cargo in it.

INAUDIBLE RADIO COMMAND It's a lot more responsive.

You have to be quite gentle with the amount of engine power you use.

-RADIO:

-One metre one.

But with 30 years' experience at sea,

Captain John makes the mother of all reverse parks look easy.

So we've lined up now, then we can shut down the engines

and start bunkering.

That was the Emerald Princess just sailing from the ocean dock.

Our first job this morning.

She sailed on time at 16:30.

She's burning, we calculated,

one gallon every 20 metres.

So she's probably burnt about a gallon in the amount of time

it's took me to say that.

The amount of fuel the large ships use is staggering.

But the shipping industry is currently transitioning from thick,

tar-like fuel oil to a cleaner liquid gas oil, similar to diesel.

The Emerald Princess is currently making the switch.

10% of its 1,120 tonnes of fuel today is the cleaner alternative.

News legislation coming in next year will prohibit ships powered only

with heavy oil from sailing in Europe's North and Baltic Seas.

The rest of the shift goes smoothly.

-RADIO:

-You might have to move her up a bit, mate.

But Captain John and his crew's day isn't over

until they've topped up their empty tanks.

An even bigger tanker has been dispatched from the UK's

largest refinery at Fawley, several miles along the shore.

We're waiting now for the Whitchallenger to turn up,

and then she will load us with some gas oil.

And that will be the last job of the night.

And it'll be time for bed.

Out on the Channel, a growing band of eco-minded fishermen

are leading the way in alternative techniques for sourcing seafood.

Through traditional methods

that make it easier to target a particular catch,

they hope to prevent the fish supper becoming a thing of the past.

Right, thanks, we'll fish somewhere else.

Skipper Ian Taylor and his four-strong crew

are line fishing for sea bass off the coast of Weymouth.

The last two days have seen them come home empty-handed,

and this morning's location also wasn't delivering.

Where we've been fishing is no good.

We've given it a real good go,

and by now, really, we should be catching fish.

We should be catching quite well.

OK, what helps is how passionate we are for our jobs.

We absolutely love it, no matter wind, rain or shine,

we're just happy to be out most of the time. Provided there's fish.

They are heading to another fishing spot 12 miles away

in the hope of a better catch.

It's going to cost me probably about £30, £40 worth

of fuel to get there, and then the same to get back again.

It's my job to put the boat on the fish.

It's their job to catch them, it's my job to find them.

We could catch £1,000 worth of fish down there. We could catch nothing.

And one thing we've always done in the past is we've always taken

the big gambles, and it's always paid off.

Right, let's get on it.

It's time to find out if Ian's gamble has paid off.

Right, boys, here we go. Last chance. It's now or never.

Fish on. Ooh, that's a better one.

A lot of fish on over there by the looks of things.

Wahey!

Cheeky kilo.

A kilo of sea bass fetches £10 on average,

so on a good week an angler can earn £1,000.

To keep track of how much they've caught,

each fisherman has his own colour tags.

-Wahey!

-Yes.

Thank you.

-Lovely.

-We should start getting a few now.

They're not a great size, but...

..beggars can't be choosers.

That's the best fishing we've had all afternoon,

so I'm hoping there's a few here now.

So we might get an hour's decent fishing.

-You all right? That's it now, we're on it.

-Going off!

-Yeah.

We get a few more of these, that'd be good.

Skipper Ian gets his first catch of the day.

What have you got there?

-I've got a bass!

-Lucky boy!

If the boss is catching, it means we can't be doing very well.

-Dave is doing all right, isn't he?

-Yeah, mate, yeah.

-Where am I going, in the bin?

-Yeah.

It's good to catch a fish for a change!

HE LAUGHS

I've got to go and catch another one.

Caught a couple of fish, they're all getting excited now.

Ohhh!

Where did you find that one, David?

-Where did you find that, Dave?

-Bottle of wine!

As soon as a few fish come over the side,

the smiles appear on people's faces.

Everyone starts to earn a little bit.

But the reality is, the crew's catch has to pay

for the boat's fuel first.

-Oh, Bazza!

-HE LAUGHS

No! Don't chuck it back!

So every catch counts.

He tried to swing the fish, and as he swung it, it hit the rail,

and it's come off, and he's lost it.

It happens. You'll never land every fish you catch.

So that fish was worth about £20.

So we've just thrown a £20 note over the side.

So, it's not my day at the moment.

But it's not an actually a great day full stop...

OK. Get a few of those.

As the day wears on, the crew assesses the catch.

Looking at that there, there's 30kg.

We want a lot more than that.

But because we've got so little amount, I know there's

a couple of local restaurants and places that buy fish off me.

I'll just put it straight into them tonight when we come in.

We haven't got enough to start worrying about putting them

into markets.

After six hours out on the Channel,

they've finally covered the cost of the boat's fuel.

And what little is left earns each fisherman £20 to £30.

I've still got to play the lads their percentage of those fish.

So even though we haven't made any money, they'll still get their bit,

their percentage of it.

-I'm so rich, it doesn't matter, does it, boys?

-No...

This, for us, is still a bad day.

Our weekly wage isn't going to be that good.

But it's something, you know?

It's better than sitting at home, I think.

You can't go, "This has been awful, I'm going to quit,

"I'm going to go and get a job in an office,"

because you're not going to get it every day where it's really good.

On a really good day, you don't even notice

the time going by because it's just so manic.

-What do you reckon, go home? Everybody had enough?

-Yeah, I reckon.

Time to go home then, guys.

-Yeah, yeah.

-THEY LAUGH

I've caught one fish all afternoon!

HE LAUGHS

But I expect we're the top.

From what I've been hearing, we are the top boat in Weymouth today.

-Whoo-hoo!

-Whoo-hoo!

The future of line fishing, really, I think it's on the up.

Because it's what people want.

The general public, the customers,

they want the fish to be sustainably caught,

and everybody's promoting sustainable fish, and the fish,

as it is, is a healthy food,

so there's a bright future for fishing.

Tomorrow will hopefully be a better day.

Today was, for want of a better word, rubbish.

Right, then.

-End of a rubbish day.

-Yeah.

Go back tomorrow and try all over again.

Tomorrow is a different day, isn't it? You never know.

Hopefully we'll make some money tomorrow.

Ian and his crew hope that better days lie ahead for them.

Sustainable fishing is gaining popularity with consumers,

a method that could help to maintain the Channel

as a rich source of food for generations to come.