Facing a net loss on the Solway
Last updated 09:22, Friday, 04 July 2008
Into the water he goes, making waves. Squelching through wet sand at Port Carlisle, his haaf net balanced across his back, Mark Graham reaches the brown sea and wades straight in.
He’ll find all kinds of things in the Solway Firth’s murky depths. Salmon. Trout. Bitter rows between haaf netters, the Government and landowners along the River Eden. Threats to a Cumbrian way of life that has lasted centuries but may be about to die.
Haaf netting has happened out here since the Vikings landed – Haaf is Norse for sea.
A thousand years of catching fish in the Solway estuary; fish en route to the Eden and the Esk. Men standing chest-deep in water, protected by waders, leaning against a homemade net fixed to a wooden frame, feeling the force of the current push against them. Hoping they won’t be washed away; an occupational hazard which has befallen many down the years.
When a salmon or sea trout swims into their net the haaf netter pulls it out, kills it with a wooden club and puts it in a bag, ready to eat or to sell.
It’s a way of life little changed since Viking times. But would even the Vikings have been a match for the Environment Agency?
This Government body says not enough salmon and trout are making it from the Solway to the Eden so this year it has halved the time in which haaf netting is allowed, from around the clock to 10am-10pm.
The number of haaf netters has also halved in 2008. Only about 50 men – this is very much a man’s world – have so far bought a £135 licence. Haaf netters say the 10am-10pm restriction is to blame. They see it as the authorities’ latest attempt to drive them out of existence.
More than 200 licences used to be made available. This has been steadily reduced to a current low of 105.
The season used to run from February until September. For the past few years the start date has been June 1. And now this: the 12-hour day.
The Solway Firth does not have the courtesy to follow Environment Agency timetables. There are days when few bountiful tides flow between 10am and 10pm. If they do, many netters are at work. And haaf netting at weekends has been outlawed for decades.
Under a grey morning sky, rain pebbledashes the ripples. Mark Graham stands with shoulder pressed to the frame of his net, braced against the ebb tide flowing out into the Solway. “My uncle Raymond has been doing this for 40 years,” he says. “But not this year. He says there’s no point.”
Graham’s net attracts just a couple of flounders: flat fish which he throws back. Slim pickings. He says most haaf netters haven’t caught a salmon yet this year.
“The Environment Agency say haaf netting prevents fish from reaching the rivers.
“That’s just ridiculous. If I thought for one minute I was harming fish stocks, I wouldn’t fish.
“The most netters you’ll see at any one time is about 15 and each net is no more than 18ft wide. The Solway is two miles wide.” One haaf netter describes it as “like fishing a swimming pool with a teaspoon”. And yet the restrictions continue to mount. Across the sands, meanwhile, haaf netters on the Scottish side of the Solway can still fish around the clock. The Environment Agency’s rules do not apply there.
Graham, 49, is a former marine biologist and current secretary of the Haaf Netters Association.
Two of his members have applied to the High Court for a judicial review to quash the 10am-10pm bylaw.
Haaf netters agree that salmon and trout have declined in the Solway but say they are not to blame. Disease spread by farmed fish, insecticides in rivers and inadequate nutrition because seabeds have been dredged for scallops are among their explanations.
Graham believes haaf netters have been made scapegoats and that landowners along the Eden have influenced the Government to crack down on them. Less haaf netting means more salmon and trout in the Eden. Graham claims one landowner has raised the price of rod fishing on his stretch of the river this year by 500 per cent.
“A few toffs up the river have got it in for us and they’ve got influence in Government,” he says. “But haaf netting belongs to the people of Cumbria.”
Anglers and haaf netters fish different waters but they find themselves in the same boat. “We’re not mutually exclusive,” insists Harold Tonge, chairman of River Eden and District Fisheries Association, which represents the Eden’s anglers and those who own the river’s fishing rights.
Tonge says anglers have also had their catches restricted by the Environment Agency. Their season has been shortened. They are allowed to take only two fish a day and, unlike haaf netters, are no longer permitted to sell them.
The Environment Agency insists its restrictions are needed. It calculates that egg numbers in the Eden have dramatically declined since 2004 while fish are still being caught by rod and net.
In 2006, 96 haaf netters declared catches of 2,910 salmon and sea trout in the Solway. In the same year about 1,000 anglers declared 1,872 salmon and sea trout on the Eden.
“It takes more skill to catch a fish with a rod than with a net,” says Tonge. “But the big problem with wild salmon is not the haaf netters. It’s what’s happening out at sea. About a third of all salmon caught are caught as a by-product and then dumped on the deck to die.
“As a country we must protect the salmon. Once they’ve gone, they’ve gone.”
Brian Batey has been haaf netting for half a century. Now 67, his father passed down his skills when Batey was a teenager, in the days before teenagers had been invented.
Generations of Bateys have inherited the tricks of the trade from their fathers, including Brian’s son Michael.
“Michael has fished for 25 years, I taught him when he was 14. I get as much pleasure seeing him catch something as I do myself. But he hasn’t been able to get out this year with the restrictions.
“If we were catching as many fish as some people seem to think, there’d be more people taking it up. Some days you might catch three or four but quite a lot of days you come away with nothing. It’s lost its enjoyment this year. I used to go out twice a day but it’s destroyed my lifestyle.
“They’re destroying the fishing. There’s no reason why any young people would want to start.
“I’m nearly at the end of my fishing life but I feel sad for anyone that’s just starting. In 10 years it’ll be gone.”
Photographs of haaf netters adorn the walls of the Hope and Anchor in Port Carlisle.
These brown-tinged images show men dressed in what passed for waterproof clothing at the end of the 19th century.
Their descendents drink here and at the King’s Arms, a mile down the road in Bowness-on-Solway. They use words like history and heritage to describe what they do.
“Since Hadrian’s Wall Trail started a lot of walkers come past and they take a great interest in it,” says Mark Graham.
Today there are more walkers than haaf netters. Graham is the only netsman to be seen. Nobody makes a living from haaf netting anymore.
Go back a few decades and a salmon could be worth a week’s wages. The influx of farmed fish and rising living standards have changed that.
And still Mark Graham and his dwindling band of ageing brothers stand for hours in these cold waters, not mourning the way of life that got away but fighting to keep it alive.
“We see the sun coming up in the morning and going down at night,” says Graham. “You get all the different shades of red showing up against the cloud formations.
“It’s the best excuse there is to stand in a lovely spot.
“This is one of the best wildernesses we’ve got left. Everything is as it was a thousand years ago.”
But for how much longer?
