ARE THE CHINESE REALLY TO BLAME?

AM I being naive about the perceived concern surrounding the effect the offshore foreign fishing fleet (allegedly largely Chinese) is having on the coastal inshore fishery that we recreational anglers target for our sporting pleasure? Sometimes one has a day on the ocean and doesn’t catch one fish or even have a “pull”. It’s incredibly disappointing, and while questioning one’s fishing ability and moping over a cold one at the Mahogany Reef, quite often you’ll find a few others bemoaning the same fate. Inevitably the cause is determined to be the Chinese trawlers which are raping our ocean.

A week or a month later we all enjoy good catches and not one skipper will say anything about the trawlers. Are they on summer holiday?

I often see Facebook posts which show charts of the Indian Ocean with graphic markings of foreign trawlers’ transponder marks almost blotting out the ocean’s surface. If it’s true and one draws in the 200 nautical mile territorial limit around South Africa’s vast coastline, how many “bleeps” occur inside our non-fishing zone?

I have to wonder, what tonnage must a trawler catch after entering our territorial waters after dark, deploying its nets or longline, catching a haul and departing again so it’s over the border by daybreak, and still show a profit for this clandestine adventure? Is it one ton of marketable fish or 20 tons?

Do the maths, then figure out the possibility of catching that one ton in the space of time the said trawler has to fish after travelling at it’s good speed of about ten knots to creep over the boundary and venture close enough inshore so that their twinkling onboard lights are visible just beyond the backline.

Something doesn’t add up.

Furthermore, where do huge shoals of yellowfin tuna or skipjack tuna or other pelagic fish occur on our coastal shelf under 50 fathoms that will allow the theoretical ton of fish to be caught in, say, four or six hours of a 12 hour night shift?

Most of us old timers have spent a good deal of our fishing lives targeting fish along the narrow continental shelf (ie under 50 fathoms) and have seldom seen and very rarely caught great numbers of the fish among the allegedly vast shoals of migrating gamefish which are supposedly the targets of these fishing trawlers.

Then there’s the rape of the demersal species of reef fish by the same “banditos”. Maybe a bobbin trawler would cause damage, but I doubt a line boat or even a longliner can do the supposed damage everyone says they do.

I am of the firm belief that the movement of pelagic gamefish along our coast is like the highly visible shoals of sardines on the KwaZulu-Natal coast — abundant some years and almost none in other years. Some years the gamefish we target arrive in good numbers and other years we barely get a chance to catch the odd one.

This fishery has cycled over the last 50 years in my experience, and when one adds into the equation the number of ski-boats fishing off our coast which has quadrupled over the same time, is it not fair to say that our chances these days are 75% less than they were 50 years ago?

Shoot me down if you like. This is entirely my own uneducated, non-scientific view, but remember that my opinion is based on over 50 years of practical offshore sportfishing experience.

Till the next tide

Erwin Bursik