The Fisheries Secretariat, one of the three core NGO´s behind the campaign Race for the Baltic, visited Ronneby and its Harbour festival where the cycling team participated in the yearly Sillarodden. The day involved collecting over 500 signatures and learning more about the traditional herring fishery in the Ronneby area.
The purpose of the Race for the Baltic campaign is to call for action to improve practices and protection of the Baltic Sea. To show our commitment, we will bike around the Baltic Sea this summer, visiting 9 countries and riding around 3 500 km in 3 months, collecting signatures from the public and other stakeholders. The campaign kicked off during World Oceans day in Malmö, Sweden, and reached Ronneby after 300 km and 9 days.
Sillarodden and Ronneby Harbour festival is an annual event organised and initiated by Ronneby Fishery Association. The festival has been taking place in the harbour since 1999 as a celebration to the local fishermen and the old tradition of how the fishermen would sell their herring landings. According to Bengt Larsson, one of the persons behind the Harbour festival and Sillarodden, back in the old days the fishermen would be out fishing for herring during the night and would return back to their home islands (located just outside the coast of Ronneby) in the early morning. The boxes of herring caught during the night was moved into a wooden skiff which the fisherman’s wife would row into the market square in town to sell – it was a daily race between the wife’s of who would arrive to the market first and have a bigger chance of getting the herring sold.
The Race for the Baltic team finished in 8th place and in hindsight were truly impressed by the strength and determination of the wives’s who would row between 6-10km or more each day.
About Race for the Baltic
The Race for the Baltic campaign will be gathering support over the summer of 2013 and will culminate in the handover of a Call for Action to our Ministers of Environment in Copenhagen on 3 October in connection with the HELCOM Ministerial meeting. Our objective in the short term is to ensure that politicians at the HELCOM Ministerial meeting in October take action to fulfil the obligations that have been agreed upon to address the pressing environmental issues in the Baltic Sea. We believe that the Baltic Sea region can become a model for management and protection of the marine environment across the EU and globally.