On a recent spring morning along the Danish coast in Thorup Strand, Thomas Højrup, chairman of the Thorup Strand Fishermen’s Guild, gathered his guests on the beach to describe an unsettling fishing practice called Fly-Shooting. This technique, a modification to the more traditional anchored Danish seine, has raised the ire of low impact fishers in Thorup Strand and other areas nearby due to the gear’s devastating impact on benthic habitat.
As opposed to the lesser impact of anchor seining with lighter gear, fishable only on a smooth, sandy bottom, fly-shooting allows Danish seiners to encroach on sensitive grounds filled with eelgrass beds and bulky limestone pinnacles which are too rough for anchor-seining. The fishers of Thorup Strand understand that this habitat is critical for juvenile fish, the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem health in the region, as well as their own fisheries as well.
The particular element which makes fly-shooting so damaging is a new and heavy ‘typhoon’ wire that can cut through rough ground where anchor-seine ropes would fail. Getting on his knees to draw in the sand while describing this gear, Højrup explained that with fly shooting “you use typhoon wire that is very heavy…and then you move forward with your boat…and the wires move very heavily on the sea floor. And if you have these limestone structures, they cut them and they move the stones away.”
While innovation is welcome in fisheries, and encouraged in the reformed Common Fisheries Policy, it must be in the direction of lessening impacts of fishing on the marine environment, especially when it puts ecosystems and dependent small scale, inshore fisheries in jeopardy. FishSec will keep abreast of developments with this gear, seeking ways to prevent its use in such sensitive areas.