His workplace encompasses most of Scotland’s north-west coast and some of the planet’s most wild and beautiful places. “I know this coastline inside out. I know where the hotspots for the scallops are. If I’m heading out of Uig on a Monday morning I’m looking at the forecasts; I’m looking at the tides and I’ve got all this to choose from as an area to fish. The tides can flow between some of these islands as fast as a river.”
Until recent years, the scallop boats and creelers fished the Clyde, but few now go there, owing to a decade of tensions with the large trawling firms which turn Scotland’s sea-beds into ploughed fields. Mr Hughson becomes cagey when I mention this. There are high politics and vested interests at play here and he simply wants to maintain his company and the 50 jobs it supports long into the future.
One other scallop-diver who speaks only on the guarantee of anonymity tells me that tying up a boat in Tarbert for a weekend is now out of the question. “I wouldn’t know if it would still be there on Monday. And if it was, I’d be checking that my fuel tank hadn’t been filled with sugar.”
This is Scotland’s ongoing, west coast Cold War that’s been raging for ten years or so beyond the gaze of the mainland. It pits those who want to fish sustainably and protect marine stocks for future generations against a handful of powerful and well-resourced trawling combines with influence in the highest realms of Scottish politics.
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The tide in recent years has slowly begun to turn in favour of the sustainable fishing community, thanks to the efforts of environmental NGOs such as Open Seas and Coast who have successfully campaigned for Scotland’s nascent Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and the No-take zone in Arran.
Four years ago, researching an article that appeared in Scottish Field, I listened in astonishment as one creeler and his wife described in detail how they’d watched £10k of fishing gear being towed away by trawlers in the middle of the night. On another occasion they’d been intimidated by a seven-strong flotilla of dredgers on Loch Fyne as police helicopters flew overhead.
In his company offices in Dingwall, Alasdair Hughson chooses his words carefully as he outlines the root of the tension. Few know Scotland’s fisheries better then him. “They don’t like us talking about them and telling the truth about the nature of what they do. It’s part of the intimidation process,” he says.
“They want us to be quiet and not to raise any of the issues of protecting the marine environment. They don’t like the work of the environmental groups like Open Seas whom they detest because they have shown what can happen when you close an area and protect it for the future.
“What we would like to see is smaller-scale fishing being given the space to thrive and to be able to produce more and employ more people and become a more attractive occupation.”
Alasdair Hughson at the Keltic Seafare HQ in Dingwall where shellfish are kept alive before being shipped south (Image: Peter Jolly. Northpix)
He expresses cautious optimism about the MPAs. “The recovery in these 10 years has been nothing short of phenomenal, especially in the scallop stocks. It’s taken away one of the threats that we saw to this business: that there wouldn’t be enough scallops to keep this business going.”
It’s not merely an issue of there being sufficient quantities, but the size of them. If you fish them too hard they never get a chance to grow. The top end markets that Mr Hughson’s business targets needs larger scallops.
“That’s also partly because there was also too much pressure from the divers going back to the 1970s when my father started doing this,” he says. “It was uncontrolled and there was no health and safety and no barriers to prevent opportunists coming in on a whim. When you combined that with the pressure of the dredging which really took off in the 1980s and 1990s the scallops got absolutely hammered, to a point where I wondered if there was a future in this.
“Thankfully, we’re now seeing a real recovery which is partly due to the fact that we now have protected areas which aren’t being fished hard and partly down to the fact that the numbers of fishermen and fishing-boats has dropped dramatically.”
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He vividly describes the anatomy of the problem. “In the Sound of Mull we swim around massive boulders and rocks, which are like factories for the scallops. On top of these lumps you have kelp forests. Two weeks ago, I was swimming with a torch amongst the kelp off the Gairloch. There are millions of small scallops which like to attach to the kelp which covers these rocks in the Sound of Mull.
“Then once it gets to a certain size, it detaches and falls off onto the seabed where they gather in huge numbers and grow. But if you pull a scallop-dredger right over the top of that rock and remove all that kelp, where’s your future stock? I remember swimming around the Sound maybe eight or ten years ago. At the end of my dive I noticed that these rocks were absolutely barren. There was nothing there.”
“Now that there are fewer dredgers, that kelp is coming back and it’s fantastic to see. It makes my heart glad to see that we might have a future in this business and the guarantee of sustainable jobs. When you dredge an area you don’t only remove the scallops and the kelp that they rely upon, you also remove the scallops’ predators. You smash up the starfish and the crabs that eat all the very small scallops. They’re replacing a rich and thrumming eco-system with a mono-culture. If that’s what you want: fine, but is that really what we want?”
He believes there’s room for compromise and negotiation. The Environmental NGOs aren’t going away, mainly because their messages of sustainability and responsible fishing have been proven to work and trace patterns that are in place all over the world.
“Maybe, looking at it from the Fishing Federation’s perspective, there are some areas where a monoculture is an acceptable outcome. But we should all be looking at what the future will look like in five to ten five to ten years’ time.
I don’t think a universally-applied three-mile limit is the answer either. It could proceed on a case-by-case; area-by-area basis. But all of our voices need to be heard.”
