A severe autumn gale had worked its way round to the nor-west, and had finally moderated in the evening to a fresh breeze. The sky had cleared, allowing the October moon to shine forth in all its glory. There was no time to lose; the ridge extending from the Continent over Ireland would be short-lived, and the wind would soon back to the south’ard again. So the Anna M left Sherkin soon after midnight, when at last the jobs were done, and also the tide lifted her sufficiently from the bottom beside the pier. At least getting caught there gave me the time to remember to take my passport! Paul Wright was with me once more; we headed south on a broad reach. As the night wore away, the wind was already slowly backing a little; we hardly needed to alter the trim of the sails as we sped in a great ark, passing some twenty-five miles south-west of the Scillies and something similar north of Ushant, whereupon we did indeed have to harden the sheets, the wind being by now east of south, touching force 6 for a while.

From some 20 miles off the Irish coast until we were south of the Scillies, common dolphins frequently played around us; though in the moonlight their presence was only barely signalled by a gasp or a splash or the flash of a fin cutting the surface of the waves, yet the unique thrill of travelling along with them was far from diminished. Swishing along with the wind and the dolphins, such wild, free and joyful creatures as they are, gives a sense of communion with nature that has no parallel that I can think of.
We came to Guernsey early on the third morning at sea, a Monday, having left Sherkin early on the Saturday. A few days there, with our Bella and her family, and it was time to press on before the weather broke, the wind being ESE and the weather fair. After a lovely night sail along the north coast of Brittany, we passed the Raz de Sein early on a grey morning, with the SE wind freshening 5/6, and giving us a hard beat down to Penmar’ch. We were running out of time before the flight home from Nantes, and found a mooring for the poor faithful boat on the Odet river(see photo).

That nice stable anti-cyclone to the west, that I would have liked to waft us down to the Algarve and which was so much on station during during August, has not put in an appearance since; but anyway Brittany is holding on to me because of the tunny fishing project that I’m working on with Dr Sam Shephard. The idea of a sail-powered commercial fishing boat has long featured in my imagination, but it’s only now, when personally, in my sixtieth year, I am running out of time, and maybe the world is too, that I am seriously attempting to give it a whirl.

While witnessing the steady decline of coastal fisheries since the boom in technology and capital that took off in the early eighties, there was little one could do except struggle to survive as simply as possible while the dream of limitless power that it evoked seemed to mesmerize nearly everyone in the fishing industry. Now at last, with the depredation in its wake obvious to all and the prospect of the whole thing folding up undeniable, I am making one last effort to get a serious hearing. Not, however, in terms of lamenting what has happened; on the principle that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, I am working on a project to open a door to a truly sustainable future.

I told the story in The Irish Skipper back in the eighties, of how I drove through Killybegs in the early days of the mackerel bonanza, and looked at the tons of mackerel being landed from tank boats, into great bins on the pier. Plenty of the fish were actually just falling on the pier, being squashed by the fork-lifts flying back and forth. But most of them managed to get into the factories to be frozen in blocks and sent off to Africa. I was on my way to Poole in England, where I joined my father for what was to be my last trip to France with him. In mid-Channel we saw French fishermen under sail, one man in each of the small boats, working away at lines towed from tangons. Subsequently I watched them landing their catch; mackerel beautifully packed in ice in small polystyrene boxes. No doubt they were not making the kind of money that the Killybegs men were, and unfortunately, having also witnessed what had happened to the coastal fishermen of Donegal, I had little hope for their future. Industrial fishing undermines and destroys artisanal fisheries both on the grounds and in the market place, and generally we have to choose between one or the other. Now which produced the better product, afforded intrinsic enjoyment and satisfaction, and especially, was sustainable for generations to come; which one was sane?
Twenty years later, we have reached a point where there a few coastal fishermen, and few fish, left. We face an unpredictable future, with oil set to become scarce and very expensive, but still with no real alternative for powering fishing boats in sight. Also, the last generation of boat-builders in our coastal communities are coming to the end of their working lives. Is there a way forward?
As far as quotas are concerned, albacore tuna is only one stock I can think of that is currently under-fished by the Irish, since drift-netting for them was banned a couple of years ago. Netting for such species as pollack has also largely come to an end, mostly because the booming population of protected seals make it frequently impossible. Both these species can be fished by trolling, and the obvious way to troll is under sail.

The fishery starts in early summer off NW Spain, and follows up along the continental shelf as the summer progresses, coming to an end in late summer around the Porcupine Bank off SW Ireland. Quite what happens to them then seems a bit of a mystery, that it would be interesting to elucidate. Sailing south in 2003, the Anna M found good fishing north of Cape St Vincent in October(see photo), but whether this would be the same stock, I do not know. Anyway, if this project can be worked up into a European effort, which would be necessary for ultimate success, there may be the possibility of a much-extended season in this direction. Otherwise, as I said, such vessels as we envisage might find off-season employment trolling for pollack, or even mackerel. Anybody interested in participating and supporting this project, please contact me.

Joe Aston

*see <http://www.biche.asso.fr/>