Episode 3 The Fisherman's Apprentice with Monty Halls

For hundreds of years, small fishing boats have set sail

to bring home the riches of our coastal waters.

He's got one! He's caught a monkfish! Yes.

But fishing has changed.

Deep-sea trawlers now catch most of the fish we eat.

Stocks are in decline, and fishermen are getting a bad name.

Hour after hour, day after day, I've lowered fish through that hatch.

Can that level of fishing be sustained long term into the future?

Rising costs and stringent regulations have left our fishermen in crisis.

Can they survive the threats to their future?

None of us really know what's around the corner.

Everything's up in the air. It's a worrying time.

Marine biologist Monty Halls is going to explore

the challenges facing our fishing industry...but from the inside.

Monty learns just why fishing is Britain's most dangerous job...

-Closer to!

-That's probably the closest I've come to a really serious incident

in my whole time out fishing.

He follows his catch from the sea to the plate,

to find out how the fish business works onshore.

Of course, all of this is money. You're just looking at money being burnt here.

And he discovers how larger vessels are affecting our traditional fleet.

You're not quite halfway yet. Another 600 to go.

Good grief! That's an outrage.

It's early July in the far south of Cornwall.

After successfully completing his apprenticeship,

Monty has been fishing from Razorbill, working the rich waters off the Lizard Peninsula,

as men have done since medieval times.

He now knows just how hard it is to make ends meet as a small-boat fisherman.

My overwhelming impression over the last few weeks

working as a fisherman is graft. It is pure graft.

And yet, the rewards for finding and catching an animal like that

are pretty minimal, really. Most of the guys on that beach,

and I'd venture that most of the guys in the inshore fishing industry in the UK,

really struggle to makes ends meet.

It is a proper, proper mission to actually make profit at the end of any month.

Our small boats may be in trouble, but the UK fleet as a whole

landed more than £700 million worth of fish last year.

A lot of money is being made somewhere along the line.

Monty wants to find out why inshore fishermen are having such a hard time.

I think the economics at the moment are probably the most pressing issue

facing the British fishing fleet,

certainly for small boats working inshore,

and so, for me, it's a priority over the next few weeks

to actually have a look and figure out what those stresses are,

and see if there's any remedy, cos if those stresses continue to be applied

and increase in their pressure,

then in 10, 20 years' time, we won't have an inshore fishing fleet,

and that would be a tragedy, I think.

For the past two months, Monty has been living and working in Cadgwith Cove,

a traditional fishing village 20 miles east of Land's End.

As well as fishing on his own, Monty is crewing with the other skippers in the cove.

He's seeing the stress they're under first hand.

John Trewin's crewman has taken some time off.

Unable to find a replacement, John has been struggling to work the boat on his own.

So, today, Monty has offered to help out.

It's a big boat to run single handed. 30 pots in a string,

10 strings. Just two of us. It's going to be hard graft today. It's going to be full on.

Bait, Monty, quick as you can.

-You're baiting two bits, two bits.

-Two bits, yeah.

At this time of year,

John uses long strings of baited pots to catch brown crabs.

This is fishing on a larger, faster scale than Monty is used to,

and it's a struggle to keep up.

Swivel, swivel, swivel out, that's it.

Closer to, bring it forward a little bit to you.

That's it.

You've got to get a cadence going, a pace going.

-A cadence?!

-A cadence. You know, when you train a rhythm...

-A cadence?

-I've never heard of that word, "cadence".

-It's what I used to say.

Tell me what the word "cadence" means!

Don't do too good a job, mind, or I'll be looking at your CV!

Trust me, there'll be no danger of that.

You can make Nige an offer.

John is not the only one struggling to find replacement crew.

The UK fishing industry is facing a recruitment crisis.

These days, there are very few young people prepared to take on this kind of work.

There's not many jobs out there, but people don't want to do this job.

I don't blame them, mind.

There's probably a lot better paid jobs for doing a lot less...

I know it is. ..a lot less work.

Fishing's hard work. Young people, you know, 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds

they don't want to go fishing. Longish hours, manual labour

don't want to do it.

Can you blame them? No.

'They're not queuing up like they used to be.

'The wages aren't regular.'

Trying to get a loan or anything like that,

fishing is quite difficult.

Definitely difficult if you're trying to get a mortgage.

The income's up and down. So up and down.

Where the youngsters are, younger fishermen to take over,

I don't know. I don't see them.

'The whole future of it is not good.'

Beautiful.

There are fewer and fewer young fishermen entering the industry.

Unless youngsters are tempted back into fishing,

it won't be long before there are only a handful of men

prepared to work some of the best grounds in the world.

-First pot, first pot.

-Just straight in, yeah?

Yeah, just keep your feet clear.

Wait there till this one's nearly gone

and then just pick it up and pass it.

Deploying the pots is the most dangerous stage of the operation.

One wrong step and you could easily be dragged over the side.

Don't walk backwards, Mont.

-Don't walk backwards?

-No, always facing the rope.

It's too much for an inexperienced crewman like Monty to take in.

He's stacked the pots in the wrong order,

and as one flies over the side, it pins him to the gunnels.

-What happened then?

-Don't know.

-All right?

-Yeah.

When that pot hit me, there was nothing I could have done about it, absolutely nothing.

If it had taken me over the side, there was no way I could have held on.

Happened in a split second, and I would have been warm and dry one second, just working,

and the next, I would have been under the water and being dragged down,

so not a very pleasant moment at all.

The price of crab is relatively low at the moment around £1.20 a kilogram.

John needs to catch at least 200 kilograms a day

roughly 220 crabs -

to cover his costs and make a decent wage.

Let me see, we've done four strings and we've got ten to do today.

It's going to be a proper physical challenge, that,

and John does it every single day.

Yeah... Whoa.

More crab pots and more crab pots and more crab pots!

Things are going well, and the pots are full of crabs.

But then the engine starts overheating.

ENGINE FAILS TO START

Argh!

I wasn't the happiest, to be honest. I was not the happiest.

No, I wasn't the happiest at all.

Bloody nightmare.

We sucked up a load of string weed into the raw-water system.

I couldn't budge it. I was getting a bit stressed.

This is the shit bit I hate about fishing. Bloody nightmare.

The boat was beam onto to the sea, and I was down in the bilge

and I was feeling a bit grim.

Shame, cos it was going all right, but turned into a bit of a disaster.

There we go.

Try that, then.

Finally, John shifts the weed and fires up the engine.

ENGINE RUNS

Things could have been a lot worse,

but there'll be no more fishing today.

It's a bitter blow, this. We're coming to the end of the good time in the crab season,

and to lose a day like today is crucial.

You know, we've only fished for half a day, basically.

It's going to be... John will have about broken even, maybe made a few bob,

of potentially what could have been a really great day for him.

The price of crab is pretty much what it was four years ago, but the cost of fuel and bait have doubled.

Margins are extremely tight,

and days like today can easily push small-boat skippers into the red.

You know, when we're sort of full swing crabbing,

you wouldn't want to be ashore too long with too big a breakdown.

I know they happen,

but you want to try and alleviate them as best as possible

because you can't afford to be sat here on the beach.

They are businesses, these boats. They have to be businesses.

They have to meet their costs.

You can't exist as they used to.

They are artisanal, small outfits,

but they've got to turn a profit, even if it's a small one.

The pressure on us...well, obviously you've got to pay your bills,

and you've got to get out there and do it. When you go fishing, some days you don't catch anything.

That's the way it is, but you've got to still go out there

and you've got to go and have a go. You've still got to put bait in the pots,

still got to go and do it, you've got to do it.

It's Thursday evening,

and the Cadgwith anglers head out for another fishing competition.

But this time, the fish they catch will be sold to raise money for the Fishermen's Mission,

a charity which supports fishermen and their families.

Organising the fundraiser is Sarah Stephens,

whose husband fishes out of Newlyn, a nearby fishing port.

-It's a really crucial organisation, isn't it?

-It's really key...

Without it, we would be in a lot of trouble, a lot of us.

I mean, it's there for all sorts of things,

like emotional support, but also crucial advice about everything.

Horrific things to deal with.

The Fishermen's Mission was set up 130 years ago

to support the relatives of men lost and injured at sea,

but in recent years, it has got involved in welfare work,

helping fishing families that have fallen on hard times.

Got more mackerel coming in that's going to be filleted off when we've had all the weigh-in.

OK, a bit of lemon...

What's it like running a household? Because I imagine budgeting must be...

Yeah, you've got to save up through the year. You've got everything coming, all your tax bills,

and if you can't go fishing for three months, or not very effectively, yeah, it's going to make a dent,

and it makes a dent and you've then got to play catch-up for the rest of the season,

and if you don't, you've got bills to pay, a boat to maintain, which is your platform, your business,

and you've got to get some money, and it's not going to do it itself.

It's impossible to budget with fishing. You just do not know.

And what a catch is worth one tide might be worth something totally different,

-as you've probably found out from the fish prices yourself.

-Yeah.

I think the trouble is, with fuel prices going up,

they have to push themselves to go fishing further and put themselves more at risk,

because they've got to bring home the catch because the fuel and everything's costing so much...

I mean, they have to pay a lot more.

As well as financial insecurity, the wives of fishermen

also have to cope with the threat of losing their husband at sea.

Fishing is by far the most dangerous job in the UK.

You are 30 times more likely to die on a fishing boat than you are on a building site.

Over the years, Cadgwith has suffered its share of losses.

The most recent was in 1994,

when a boat went down with both hands.

I remember the day it happened.

It was a...misty old muggy one.

Wasn't that windy, like. It was a misty old miserable, you know...

Cornish mizzle. Real mizzly, drizzly old day, like,

and then, Friday night, come down the pub,

didn't think nothing of it, you know. Had the usual sing-a-long, whatever.

Didn't hear nothing till the morning and then heard it on the radio.

Sadly terrible things happen of which, in Cadgwith, we've had first-hand experience,

and it's that thing that you keep at the back of the cupboard and you don't look at.

You just can't go there, and then, when it does happen,

it's the sum of all your fears made real.

Yeah...

Yeah, devastating. Absolutely devastating,

Yeah. I've got a job to...

Brings back bad memories.

Support the mission in every way you can, please! We've got some beer, we've got some lovely mackerel.

Raffle over here, so please get some raffle tickets. Strawberries and cream. Wonderful things! OK?

Brilliant turnout this evening.

The Cadgwith boats are some of the smallest in the UK fleet.

Such craft make up 75% of all British fishing vessels,

but they only account for 6% of the seafood landed on our shores.

The vast majority is caught by bigger boats.

To find out what impact larger vessels might be having on the Cadgwith fleet,

Monty has come to Mylor, a harbour 15 miles further up along the coast.

The Harvester II is a purpose-built crabber

and the biggest boat fishing the inshore waters off the Lizard Peninsula.

You could fit Razorbill onto this deck five or six times, comfortably.

Obviously, you can hear that great sort of throaty rumble of the engines as well, you know.

This is fishing on a much, much larger scale.

The Harvester reaches its fishing grounds six miles offshore from Cadgwith,

and the crew haul their first pots of the day.

In this string, there's about 80 pots.

Now, Razorbill, in total, deploys 48 pots,

so there's twice as many pots coming up in this string

as I'll use in an entire day, or even three or four days, in Razorbill.

The Harvester works as many as 1,800 pots,

three times more than most of the Cadgwith crabbers.

Getting through such a lot of gear requires an organised, experienced crew.

For now, Monty is just going to watch and learn.

You can see it's a really slick operation.

Everyone has a specific job, and you've got to work really quickly.

You've got to get everything exactly right.

The pots have got to be stacked exactly right, otherwise they won't deploy properly.

Every crab has to come out, every pot has to be baited, and it all has to be done at real speed.

And bear in mind, your whole world is going like this all the time.

You're constantly balancing and correcting all the time.

Razorbill just wouldn't belong out here.

There are even bigger boats working close by

scallop-dredgers and foreign beam trawlers.

In recent years, these large, powerful vessels

have increased their fishing efforts right up to the six-mile limit -

a zone which protects the UK's inshore waters for our smaller boats.

A few years ago,

skipper Henry Altenburgh could fish wherever he liked.

But the influx of larger vessels to the area has forced him to change his tactics.

One of the reasons for staying inside the six-mile limit,

which is not what we used to do, is,

we have big problems with the big scallopers

and we have big problems with the French.

And because the gear costs so much money these days,

you cannot afford to lose it.

The scallop-dredgers and trawlers fish by dragging their gear along the sea bed.

They'll catch anything that stands in their way, including Henry's crab pots.

A few years ago, a French trawler almost wiped him out.

We went outside, not last year, but the year before,

-and we lost 40 pots. Well...

-That's a lot of money, isn't it?

That's right, you're looking at £60-odd a pot to replace them.

You cannot afford to do that very often.

We had about four years or five years on the trot,

we lost so much gear that I said to my son, I said,

"If we have one more year like this, that is the end."

The destruction that one rogue boat

could cause in a night could be tens of thousands.

-Yeah.

-We've lost, over the years, well over six figures of kit.

-Right.

The increased threat of foreign trawlers and scallopers

means the Harvester has to fish inside the six-mile limit.

But this has had a knock-on effect -

it now works the same grounds as the Cadgwith skippers,

putting the smaller boats under increased pressure.

It's time for Monty to get to work.

James is going to talk me through how to stack the pots,

because there's 80 pots here, so if you get it wrong

and all 80 try and go over the stern at once...

-It could be a big mess.

-It could be messy.

-Straight across.

-Just in the corner there. That's it.

-Just straight on top.

-Yeah.

-No, on top again.

-Oh, on top, of course.

And there again. No, up top.

I was doing so well.

That must be 80.

You're not quite halfway yet.

As the day goes on, the wind picks up until it's approaching force 6.

None of the Cadgwith boats could be out in such big seas.

Being able to work in all weathers is the key advantage

bigger boats have over smaller ones.

It's not long before the rough seas begin to take their toll on Monty.

HE VOMITS

A few weeks ago, Monty was incapacitated by seasickness.

He's determined not to let that happen today.

-So this one goes...?

-Just against the side.

Against the side. Thanks, mate.

And that's it. Only another 600 to go!

Oh, good grief! That's an outrage.

-Ready?

-I'm back.

If I feel I'm going to go, I'll go that way.

-We don't want you to get swept over the side.

-No, me neither!

HE VOMITS

The sickness thing, it was a real Achilles' heel,

and, in terms of my currency as a fisherman, it was a crippling blow.

If you get sick out there, you can't be a fisherman.

'But I think it's like anything, you've just got to keep going.

'And Harvester was the first time I'd worked through the sickness,

'so, you know, a red letter day in many, many ways, really. It was real redemption.'

Eight to go!

Eight!

Despite the bouts of sickness, Monty helps stack the gear for the rest of the day.

That's a whole string.

You've done the lot.

I wasn't going to say anything till you got to the end.

James tots up the catch 25 bins, almost a tonne and a half of crab,

more than double what a smaller boat would get, even on a good day.

But there are even bigger boats out there than Harvester,

landing even more crabs, keeping supply up and the price down.

Monty and the other Cadgwith crabbers are small boats

working in a mass market.

So I can kind of understand why the price is slightly depressed

on what I thought it would originally be looking at the smaller fleet.

It starts to make a little bit more sense,

but I still need to figure out why, in a restaurant,

one of these is 16, 17 quid

and why I'm getting £1.23 a kilo.

There's still a massive discrepancy there.

To find out why crab meat is so expensive to buy,

Monty has travelled west along the coast to Newlyn.

With more than 190 boats working out of the harbour,

it's one of Britain's busiest fishing ports.

Many fishermen here target shellfish,

and most, like Monty, sell their catch to this local merchant.

This is Harveys and this is where the crab is picked and processed.

Now, it's very important, obviously, when it leaves -

hygiene is crucial here - there's no bits of me in the crab that leave.

So I've got the hairnet covering my glorious thick head of hair,

I've got an outer layer, there'll be an apron on top of this, and wellies,

and I need to go and scrub up like some surgeon before an operation, so here we go.

Crabs are transported here live, killed,

boiled and then shipped up to the picking room.

A quarter of the weight of each animal is meat.

But millions of years of evolution have ensured that crab flesh is well protected,

and so some effort and skill is required to extricate it.

You get to know the fault lines, don't you, in the shell?

There's natural points of weakness.

This is a family business,

started by Matthew Harvey's great-grandfather almost 60 years ago,

and it's built up close ties with the Cornish fishing fleet.

What's your biggest overhead here?

Biggest overhead after the actual cost of the shellfish itself

is very closely followed by the labour,

so it's probably 45 to 50 staff directly involved with turning crabs and spider crab

into a product for sale.

-That's a year-round operation.

-Yeah.

At the moment, the British don't eat much shellfish,

and most crab meat goes to the Continent.

But some travels even further afield.

Some live crabs are being airfreighted over to Asia.

Now, there's an awful lot of cost involved in that again.

That is amazing, isn't it? That it's caught off the Lizard

and then it's on a flight to China.

I think the wholesalers are in a difficult position

because they have to respond to market forces.

The market forces mean that there's a lot of crab on the market,

it's expensive to process,

so obviously when they buy it from the suppliers -

and the suppliers are the fishermen -

they can't pay huge amounts of money for it.

But, of course, those incremental decreases in the price of crab

have a devastating impact on a small-boat fisherman.

He'll only catch a certain amount of crab,

and if the price of that crab comes down, it's going to hit him really hard,

particularly when he's skating along the edge of bankruptcy anyway.

It's an interesting problem. I'm not quite sure what the solution is.

Monty wants to see how another of the Cadgwith skippers,

Louis Mitchell, is coping with the financial pressures facing the small boat fleet.

This is Victoria Anne.

This boat is only six inches longer than Razorbill

and yet it's a different set-up. It's a stern shooter,

it's designed to be run single-handed by Louis.

The boat's compact and efficient, just like Louis.

LOUIS LAUGHS

Louis spent six months modifying the Victoria Anne before he took her to sea.

Everything is perfectly laid out to ensure safety

and maximise efficiency.

Whereas most skippers buy their bait, Louis makes his himself,

salting huge quantities of herring to make the perfect bait for his prey, lobsters.

And unlike some of the other skippers in the cove,

Louis works alone,

so he never has to worry about finding or losing crew.

It's a niche here, and that's it, it's being exploited,

I'm exploiting it.

What, as in the niche of the single-handed, smaller boat?

Yeah, coastal fisherman.

With a crew, you've got to go, because they've got to live, and so that's why you're doing it.

I quite enjoy doing my own thing, not that I begrudge paying anybody!

Louis has made a conscious decision to go for lobsters instead of crabs,

targeting a niche, high-value species over one that is caught in bulk.

He fishes in the rocky coves and inlets just past the Lizard Point.

Bigger boats can't operate this close to the shore,

so Louis has these waters pretty much to himself.

Another beautiful lobster. Ow, that's just nailed me!

Though he's been fishing for almost three decades,

Louis has always been one of the first to embrace

new technology such as electronic navigation.

You see Louis is looking at the plotter there,

he's identifying pinnacles, it's a completely different set-up,

much more advanced than Razorbill.

The Victoria Anne also has a device that creates a 3-D image

of the seabed, so Louis can place his pots exactly where he wants them.

-So this is actually demonstrating the contours of the seabed.

-Yeah.

I'm looking to put a string along a particular contour

which is preferably where the ledge comes down and meets the bottom.

-I'm trying to get it to go along the route of that contour.

-Right.

And that's hopefully where the lobster is.

-you've got those kind of vertical surfaces...

-Yeah.

-Leading to the...

-Leading to the horizontal surfaces.

Yeah, and that's where the lobsters will forage.

So in a perfect world, that bit of kit is getting you your strings

-and pots sitting on that horizontal ledge in a perfect line.

-That's right.

-What we're going to do now, we're going to put this string through here.

-Right.

In-between that valley there.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-Can you do that on Razorbill, can you?

Totally confident, totally confident.

Makes you wonder what the old fellas

who sat on the stick 100 years ago would make of all this.

If Grandpa would come back now, he'd be shaking his head.

By using technology and running his operation

with almost military efficiency,

Louis has been able to reduce his number of pots, yet still catch the same amount of lobsters.

But falling demand for such a luxury seafood has reduced

the price of lobster, and despite all his efficiencies,

Louis still struggles to make a profit.

You've got to look for ways of increasing our incomes.

Of course. And it's all about margins, isn't it?

It is about margins because the squeeze is on with fuel,

bait, you're taking a cut in wages.

I suppose we're in world recession and it all is running

back down the line again. It's like farming and milking, you know,

'the pressures are put back on the bloke who's on the bottom.

'We've got to try and get round that somehow.'

It's a tricky time, and it's going to be for a few more years yet.

Louis is at the top of his game. He's a fisherman who fishes

so efficiently and cost effectively

and yet he's struggling to make ends meet and if Louis can't do it,

you know, then there is a really big problem here and I think

it would be interesting to explore what other means there are

of the fishermen actually making money, trying to make a living

because plainly at the moment, this model, they're really struggling with it.

Marine conservationists maintain that a major selling point of our inshore boats

is that they are more environmentally-friendly than bigger vessels.

They work small amounts of gear and only go to sea when the weather allows them,

reducing pressure on fish populations.

They travel short distances, burning less fuel than larger boats.

The nets and pots they deploy are known as static gear

they are not dragged over the seabed like a scallop dredge or a beam trawl.

We're not all trawling. We're static gear fishermen. That's what we are.

A lot of people don't know the difference. The general public doesn't know the difference.

Static gear inflicts minimal damage to the seabed.

And much of what is caught is still alive

and can be returned to the sea if undersized or unmarketable.

Right, young lady, good luck.

We're sifting out all the juvenile crabs, all the white ones,

what goes in the bin is top-quality crab for somebody to pick, you know.

You're replacing the stock all the time,

you're only taking out a certain percentage of the stock.

Everybody's doing the same, it's really good,

really sustainable fishery.

Small boat skippers also look after the future of the industry.

A few years ago, they decided voluntarily to start marking

the tails of egg-carrying female lobsters.

It is now illegal to land such animals

until the notch has grown out and the lobsters have been given a few years to breed.

Monty has been targeting lobsters closer to the shore.

And he's starting to have some success.

Every now and then you get what are called berried hens

and that's essentially a female lobster with eggs. There's 20,000 eggs there

and the female will carry them around for nine months.

And the survival rate is about one in 20,000, basically.

One of those eggs will become a full-sized lobster.

These eggs will have to take their chances in the wide empty spaces of the open ocean

because I'm letting this old lady go, but these eggs

are the luckiest eggs in Cornwall. I'm going to take them ashore

and hopefully their survival rate will be dramatically improved.

Razorbill is one of only 20 small boats in Cornwall

with a special licence to bring berried lobsters ashore

as part of a scheme to further secure the future of the species.

Well, here she is, the expectant mum.

This is a bit of wet carpet just to keep her moist and also it creates

a very dark, enclosed, safe environment for her to minimise stress.

There she is, and there are her eggs, just under her tail there.

And you can see they're bright red,

you can actually see little black dots in them,

so she's totally ready to spread those into the water column.

Monty heads north across Cornwall to the National Lobster Hatchery in Padstow,

a charity that is working to preserve lobster stocks in UK waters.

My precious cargo.

-Hi.

-Is it Dom?

-Good to meet you.

-Hello, I'm Monty.

-Nice to meet you.

-This is an expectant lady.

Brilliant. Let's have a quick look at her.

Fish biologist Dominic Boothroyd assesses Monty's lobster.

Yeah, that's good, she's probably got a couple weeks to go, I'd say. Maybe a week to go.

Right. What happens to this young lady now?

What we'll do, we'll put her into some water,

she'll have a disinfectant bath for an hour,

and then she'll go in with other expectant mothers in the brew tank.

It's like a kind of spa. I've sort of bonded with this one,

we've been through a lot, me and this lobster.

After hatching, the larvae are transferred into a rearing container

which is pumped with fresh seawater, recreating the ebb and flow of their natural environment.

In the wild, very few lobsters would make it through these early, vulnerable stages.

A much greater proportion of those reared here will survive.

Finally, in a few months' time,

the juvenile lobsters will be boxed up, transported to the sea, and released.

Have you found that the fishermen are onside about all this?

Yeah, really onside, really supportive.

They supply our berried females.

We couldn't do anything without that. They want to be involved, they want to help us release as well.

Without that involvement, I don't think the project would have much impact on the industry.

We're trying to create a seeding programme

where the fishermen are seeding their own grounds.

Monty and Dom are going to release the offspring of a lobster

caught close to Cadgwith a few months ago.

What we'll do is we'll pump... basically pump the lobsters down to the seabed

and have a nice little flume ride on the way down.

That avoids the risk of them being intercepted by lots of shoaling fish,

predatory fish, like mackerel, sardines, that sort of thing.

When the weighted pipe has sunk to seafloor,

the baby lobsters are scooped into the pump.

There we go. Good luck, chaps,

it's a jungle out there.

And the moment they hit the bottom, they'll disseminate from that tube

and burrow in almost straight away?

-That's quite an instinctive reaction.

-They will hide as soon as they can.

-Right.

-So they'll get out the end of the tube and they'll go, "Where am I?"

Then the idea is they hide very quickly

-and then after a while, once they've relaxed, they build a burrow.

-Right.

In the wild, once we've released them,

we think the survival rate can be somewhere around 50%.

-And in total we've done?

-1,600.

1,600. So in this area now

there are 1,600 juvenile lobsters burrowing in.

Hopefully, in five or six years' time,

along this five-kilometre stretch of coastline,

-there'll be 800 lobsters of a size.

-Something in that region.

Additional lobsters to what was already there.

Right, terrific.

Every year, the hatchery releases

about 30,000 juvenile lobsters around the Cornish coast.

And, with any luck, in five years' time, that will turn into that.

The lobster seeding programme is one of many ways small boat skippers

are helping to ensure the future of stocks.

But at the moment, they receive little, if any,

financial reward for being some of our most sustainable fishermen.

It's mid-summer, and the holiday season is in full swing.

Many visitors come to Cadgwith to see a traditional fishing port.

But the future of the fleet is in serious doubt.

What would the cove be like without its fishermen?

If you took the fishing boats away,

the pack of cards would fall very, very rapidly

because the beach wouldn't be a fishing community any more.

The shops, the pub, the schools would be affected.

It would also inevitably lead

to the change of use of all these buildings,

like the one we're sitting in,

into another lot of holiday lets.

I think you only need to look at other places in Cornwall

that had a community like this

30, 40, 50 years ago, 20 years ago, even.

And you look at them now,

they're ghost towns, to be honest.

The fishing fleet is what made Cadgwith what it is now,

it's what built the place in the first instance.

Everything that is important in Cadgwith happens on

and around the beach.

It is a fishing village, there's no point in it existing

if it isn't a fishing village.

Monty is heading out with Cadgwith fisherman Nigel Legge.

As well as lending him Razorbill for the past six weeks,

Nigel has become Monty's mentor,

teaching him the basics of crab and lobster fishing, and explaining the intricacies of life in the cove.

Today, they are hauling some tangle nets.

These are set along the seabed to catch spider crabs,

which come into shallow waters in the summer to breed.

-He's of a size, isn't he?

-He's all right.

In you go, fella. Unlucky.

At this time of year, most spider crabs are caught

by small boats working close to the shore.

So there are fewer on the market than brown crabs,

and they do fetch a slightly higher price.

But demand for spider crabs in the UK is almost non-existent,

though Nigel maintains this has nothing to do with how they taste.

If you like shellfish and you have a spider crab,

you'll never go back to a normal crab. It's as simple as that.

Why do you think they just haven't caught on in the UK?

I think you've got to ask the question,

has any crab really caught on in the UK?

We aren't a shellfish-eating nation.

If you tell someone that what they're about to eat is exquisite meat,

it's sweet, it's organic, as organic as anything can be,

because it's completely wild and they're going to really enjoy it,

and then you put that in front of them...

That's the reaction we need to overcome I think,

because that's kind of scary-looking and alien-looking.

And it's called a spider crab for a reason.

It looks like a damn great big spider.

More than 95% of all the spider crabs caught in UK waters

are exported to the Continent.

Monty wants to find out why spider crabs are highly valued elsewhere,

yet totally disregarded in the UK.

It's madness that we don't eat these animals.

Surely that is obvious.

So what I'm going to do is follow these crabs to the Continent

and I'm going to find out why it's different over there.

For me, this is the start of a journey, following these guys.

It's a start of a journey for both of us.

These are the crabs myself and Nige caught, and they've got a tag, just to identify them,

a little tie wrap we've stuck on there. This is the next stage of the journey.

So they've been caught out there, they've been landed

and they're about to go into the back of Gary's truck and be taken to Newlyn.

The crabs are taken to holding tanks on the outskirts of Newlyn.

Harveys now sell them on to other shellfish merchants

who deal directly with buyers on the Continent.

It's extraordinary the scale of this.

It's quite mind-blowing, actually, the sort of industrialisation

of this luxury foodstuff.

But it's all to feed those insatiable markets overseas,

that's the reason all of this exists, really.

Monty's crabs have been bought by a Cornish company called Camelfish.

They are loaded into seawater tanks that are continually pumped with air

so the crabs can be transported alive.

This is perfect habitat for them that they're going into now.

It's cold, it's very heavily oxygenated,

so it's like a first class compartment for them, really, for the next stage of the trip.

Monty is going to follow behind to see where his crabs end up.

The ferry docks in Brittany,

and the truck sets off through the French countryside.

A big articulated lorry like this does about eight miles to the gallon.

The further the crabs travel, the more expensive they become.

All of this adds to the price of the crab.

There's a lorry driven by a man, both of those things cost money.

There's labour costs, fuel costs, you've got to buy the truck.

You know, this is one of the reasons that to buy it on the beach there,

the wholesalers charge that much,

and yet when it hits a table in a restaurant, it's gone to that much.

Monty's crabs have been bought by another shellfish merchant

and will now be distributed to local businesses.

You can see they're in great shape,

you can see they're very, very lively,

so they're as fresh as the day they were caught off Cadgwith, which was two days ago.

I'll be really curious to see where they actually end up.

In you go, fella.

One of the shellfish merchant's main customers is the local supermarket.

Crabs from all over Europe end up here,

alive and on display in huge tanks.

Look at the price of this crab. It's eight euros per kilo.

Now, when I sold the crab on the beach,

it was considerably less than that, obviously.

It was maybe 20% of that price, and the reason is,

that other 80%, of course, is simple market forces.

It's gone through a large logistical chain -

it's had to be stored in the UK, it's had to be picked up from that storage facility in the UK,

it's had to go on a ferry, it's had to go in a truck,

it's had to be stored at this end and then transported to the supermarket -

this massive distribution network that all costs money.

In Brittany, spider crabs are the centre piece of a family meal,

just like a joint of beef would be in the UK.

When you manges... do you break it open?

SHE SPEAKS IN FRENCH

-Ah, magnifique.

-C'est tres bon.

-Tres bon! Enjoy.

Good Cornish crab.

-Au revoir.

-Au revoir.

The gentleman and the lady there were just saying,

"We get home, a bit of wine, a bit of bread, boil it for 20 minutes,

"sit round with the family, crack it open."

What a great thing to do. And you've done it with an animal you've seen is alive,

you seen it in its environment, you've picked an individual animal that is in good condition...

It's such a great way to shop and I think we're missing a trick here.

I think it's encapsulated for me in, there we are, got a picture of a lovely Bretagne fishing boat,

and you come down from the fishing boat and that's the stuff it's catching.

There's that direct link

and it's great to see that close attention to where this food comes from

and appreciation of where this food comes from.

Fishermen, and the seafood they catch,

are an integral part of Bretagne culture.

Oh!

Complete with....

In a traditional restaurant by the beach,

Monty meets Marc, the shellfish merchant who bought his spider crabs.

A great many places in the UK, if this came to a table

-the diners would run screaming out the door, you know.

-Ah, yes.

From what I heard about British cooking, I heard that

the British breakfast killed more people than the British Army.

The crab is boiled for 20 minutes, then served with bread, mayonnaise

and a crisp white wine.

But spider crab meat is so delicious,

this is considered to be a gourmet meal.

People want to enjoy it, to have a special meal.

They do spider crab for the weekend and for special occasions.

So they can buy a live spider crab...

-Mmm-hmm. And cook it themselves.

-Cook it themselves, pick it themselves.

-So this is almost like... In England, we have a Sunday roast.

-Yes.

-This would almost be the equivalent of a Sunday roast.

-Yes.

Many of the sales are by the week, yes.

You have to have time to eat it and to appreciate it.

I get the impression as I drive around that the fishing

is a really key part of the identity of this part of France.

In Brittany, people are proud of two things -

the fishing and the farming. There is no real industry in Brittany,

it's mainly going on the food,

either from the field or from the sea.

Your spider is very good.

I only catch the very best, I'm well known for it.

Small numbers but they're very good.

It wasn't just a meal, that, I think it was an experience.

You see families coming in and people nattering

and great steaming mounds of seafood coming out, local produce.

It's part of the culture. Why have we lost that?

I just wonder why that's the case.

Cadgwith, incidentally, is about 100 miles that way,

and there's a yawning gap in that 100 miles,

this vast chasm, between the way seafood is appreciated here

and seafood appreciated on the mainland of Britain.

I've no idea why that is and it's something I think we should get back.

Whereas it seems here in France the fishing fleet is cherished and revered

and is part of the identity,

certainly here in Brittany, I don't get that same feeling in the UK.

Monty's now convinced that if spider crabs were sold just a few miles from where they were caught

instead of being shipped overseas,

Cornish fishermen could be paid a better price.

And if people at home appreciated their local seafood as the Bretons do,

they might care more about the long-term survival of their fishing fleet.

Hundreds of visitors have descended on Cadgwith for a gig racing festival.

Inspired by his trip to France,

Monty wants to find out if there is any logical reason

why spider crabs are not eaten in the UK.

So he's going to put the tourists' taste buds to the test.

I'm quietly convinced that we just don't know how good spider crab is.

Most of us just haven't got a clue how good it is.

So with the able assistance of Nige,

we've set up a little stall here

and we're going to have a bowl of brown crab, edible crab,

and we're going to have a bowl of spider crab,

but we're not going to tell people which one's which.

We'll stick the results on the board here

and we'll find out at the end of the day

what the great British public think of spider crab

and what they think of edible crab.

Get stuck in and give us your honest opinion.

Crab B, I think, is much nicer crab than this one.

It's got a different texture, a lot more flavour.

B has more taste, I just like it better.

I would say A is the crab, B is the spider.

But which one do you prefer?

Both of them, I love them.

-That's got a much richer taste.

-Mmm.

Having the two together, it really does make a difference, and definitely B.

I don't think I've ever had one before in my life, but I prefer B,

and from here on, I'm going to start eating crab because it's delicious.

So the scores on the doors at the end -

23 people said they preferred edible crab to spider crab.

And 65 people said they preferred spider crab to edible crab.

So three times as many people

like the spider crab as like the edible crab.

So proof, were it needed, that we are insane

sending all this fantastic food overseas.

There it is, larger than life.

Taste does not explain why spider crabs aren't eaten in Britain.

It has more to do with the severing of the link to our coastal waters,

and to the men who fish them.

If we appreciated our seafood more,

perhaps we would care more about the problems facing our fishermen

and we would value costal communities like Cadgwith,

where, for now, at least,

the land is still connected to the sea.

Next time - Monty swaps one of the smallest fishing boats in Cornwall

for one of the largest, as he braves storm-force winds on a beam trawler.

Things can go wrong.

Everything aboard the boat is put to its maximum stress.

I'm told... I'm told I'm being a total lightweight.

He discovers the truth about trawlermen.

They're calling us villains cos we're raping the seabed.

We're just honest working men, doing an honest working day.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd