BIM (Irish Sea-fisheries Board) have finally responded, five months down the road, to the application Sam put to them for funding for a study of the feasibility of trolling for tuna under sail – negatively. Meanwhile, we’ve both become too interested in the idea to just let it drop. After all, it would have been amazing if they had supported us. Not that the BIM staff were not impressed and enthused by the project. It’s just that when push comes to shove they were not up to the change in mind-set that is required.

As a professional fisherman at the end of a long career, with sons also engaged in the industry, I am in fact optimistic by nature, but I am only glad when scientists come out with dire warnings as to the future of sea-fisheries, since they confirm what I have thought for years, and have nearly given up trying to express. I am more afraid for the human race than for the fish; the fisheries will surely become uneconomic before the fish are actually wiped out. For those who are very lively on their feet, I do believe there is usually some opportunity or other, given the fact that there is just nothing like wild sea-food. And yet see how we have actually managed to bring about a situation where a feed of wild salmon is apparently to be a memory of the past.

So many indicators point to a very unhealthy situation, but what is particularly discouraging is that one has yet to encounter any real admission on the part of those with responsibility that a radically different approach is called for. There has been something inherently destructive in the whole set-up, the attitude to nature and to technology and indeed to conservation, yet this is regarded as too complex and difficult a matter for our poor technocrats to take into account. A certain ghastly puritanism denies our people the simple expedient of attending to their feelings. Going trolling for tuna under sail sounds just too much like good fun to be taken seriously. It reminds me of the comment of one of my guests last summer; ‘How do you live with yourself, making a living in such a fantastically enjoyable way?’

There are in fact many hard-headed reasons for not deliberately turning our backs on all that free energy whistling about the sea, or at the very least for fishermen to keep in touch with the technology for using it. Just because, right now, the price of oil has come back a little, does it really need to be repeated that our civilisation is in a very fragile situation, massively dependent on a finite commodity that could become extremely expensive at any moment, and with still no adequate alternative in sight? That anyway our over-dependence on it is proving highly destabilising to the whole environment, both in climatic and political terms? Also that countries rich in their own natural resources of food would have been wise not to let themselves become massively dependent on importing it, so that it is reckoned the UK for example would start to experience serious food shortages within five days of a shut-down of international transport?