It's all hands on deck to land sustainable sardines

As part of this year’s Sustainable Seafood Week, the MSC’s Senior PR and Media Manager for UK & Ireland, Karen Attwood, spoke with sardine fishermen from Cornwall about life at sea, why sustainability is so important to them and how to best cook sardines.

Fishing for sardines in Cornwall is like being on “a roller coaster” according to Will Treneer, skipper of the Lyonesse fishing vessel. 

The Cornish sardine fishery, which consists of fifteen small boats, uses ring nets. The vessels search for the sardines using sophisticated sonar and when a shoal is spotted the net will be deployed with the aim of encircling the fish. 

“Other boats will have good and bad days but with ring netting you have the cream or nothing at all,” Will explains. 

Originally referred to as pilchards, sardines are pelagic fish that can be found from the Mediterranean up to the coast of Cornwall, where they are primarily caught in Mounts Bay and Mevagissey Bay. 

“You don’t lose the excitement,” Will explains. “Ring netting is a roller coaster of emotions. You can have hours and hours of nothing going right…nothing… and then in the space of ten minutes you could have ten or fifteen tonnes of fish right next to the boat.” 

But for the skipper, it takes a mental toll, he adds. “There is so much at stake all the time. There is a lot riding on the decisions you make.” 

Will at 32 is a young skipper and says that ring netting bucks the trend for other types of fishing where you might have an average age of around fifty. 

Tom Lambourn is one of Will’s crew. The 25-year-old shares the skipper’s excitement about the job.

“You work out in the wild and see different things every day, dolphins, sharks, sometimes whales, tuna,” he smiles. “No day is the same. You have the opportunity to push yourself and work hard and be rewarded for it. It doesn’t always work but when it all aligns, it goes well.”

Whereas Will, like many fishermen started out at 16 having grown up around the industry, Tom went to Cardiff University to study chemistry before he realised in his summer holidays that he was longing to come home and fish rather than sit indoors rather than be sat indoors studying.

Sardine fishing was first recorded in Cornwall 500 years ago and it’s a profession that has been passed down from generation to generation.

“My dad was catching sardines as part of the ring net fleet,” Tom says. “He did pretty much everything through his career, netting and handlining. I’ve been going out with a crewman since age six or seven years old and mucking around with a small boat.”

For both fishermen sustainability is paramount. 

“We want this fishery to be successful,” says Tom. “It’s been a huge success and we want to ensure it goes on as much as possible. The stock biomass goes up each year and we are fishing well within the limits of that. We collect scientific data a couple of times a week to support the management of the fishery. We're very proactive so that it remains a success story for future fisherman. Why would you not want fish for the future?”

Will agrees: “We have to be sustainable as otherwise we are cutting our own throats.”

Cornish landings have risen from the 7 tonnes in the mid-90s to around 7,000 tonnes in 2018. The fishery is run by the Cornish Sardine Management Association (CSMA), a partnership between the owners of the fifteen vessels, and four local seafood processors.

Cornish Sardines first achieved MSC certification in 2010 and have undertaken annual audits in order to remain certified. In 2019, the fishery won the MSC Award for Scientific Contribution to Seafood Sustainability as a result of the hard work it has put in to improving the science and data around the sardines and bycatch in order to maintain its MSC certification.

The season usually begins in July with the arrival of the sardines in Cornish waters, and lasts until February when they migrate elsewhere. The schedule is gruelling. The fishermen go out an hour before dusk which means a late evening start in summer, sometimes not finishing until 6am or 7am and sleeping during the day. In winter, it’s a much earlier start around 3.30pm or 4.30pm and depending on the catch the shift can be done in several hours.

As Will explains: “Weather permitting we do six nights a week from mid-July ‘til February. It’s a grind. It’s hard work. It gets easier as the year goes on, and the winter hours are a bit more convenient.”

James Roberts is another young skipper at 29. While he loves being at sea “the scenery is a big appeal to me”, he also doesn’t enjoy doing the nights during the long summer.

“It is only the weather and occasionally the factory that limits us but if it’s fine weather we are at sea every night until Christmas,” he says. “We have to make the most of it while the demand is there, and the price is there. Winter is more sociable as you finish earlier. I do prefer the autumn and wintertime... but in summer you can make the best money.”

James explains that as well as the sonar the fishermen look at the birds for clues to find the fish.

“Gannets feeding off shoals of fish is a sign,” he says. “The gannets get spooked by the boats. You can locate the fish in that way. You can also see the actual fish themselves crashing on the surface on a calm, glassy day.”

Peter Bullock, one of the more experienced skippers at 47, says it takes a certain type of mindset to be able to deal with the relentlessness of the job during the summertime.

“When you start working in July and August, even if it’s a weekend we have to go out every single night for a season. We might do 20 days without a day off.  

“We start praying for the wind gods to break a gale to give you a day off. It’s different sort of fishery. Some crew can’t deal with that mentally. I’ve had one crew member been with me fifteen, sixteen years and another six years and I’ve had others who literally couldn’t take a month.”

Peter’s father was fishing mackerel in the early 70s when the fishery was booming and did it for seven or eight years, leaving when it crashed. Sustainability is also vital for Peter.

“You invest that much money in the fishery and you want to support it as much as possible,” Peter says. “It’s such a small fleet of vessels. It’s all local. It’s all on the doorstep.

“In this day and age all the celebrity chefs are talking about MSC and you hope the general public pick up on it so that when they see it on sale they know it’s a good product caught. They know it is Cornish and how it has been caught.”

Dave Pascoe, skipper of the Serene Dawn started fishing at 15 and recently turned fifty.

“You can make whatever you want of this job,” he says. “The beauty of being self-employed is that you can kill yourself or live a life of luxury. For the part of the world we live in, it is pretty good money and we live somewhere beautiful.”

His son Billy helps him out when he gets home from school.

“He absolutely wants to be a fisherman,” Dave says. “He is dead keen.”

“When we were building the market, we caught to order but now the market has grown" he adds, "A lot of the catch is exported to France and Spain but now there is a growing market in the UK.”

The Cornish fishery is also the only European pilchard (Sardina pilchardus) fishery that is currently certified. From 2015 to 2016, MSC labelled Cornish sardines were sold in five markets - UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany & Switzerland. But between 2020 and 2021 this had grown to ten markets: UK, Ireland, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Spain & Portugal.

Data from Seafish shows that there is a growing market for sardines overall in the UK with a 9.1% increase from 2019 to 2020.

Rich in omega 3, sardines are good for your health as well as tasty. Dave enjoys his sardines grilled or marinated in the oven. “They are very flavoursome,” he says.

Peter’s tip: “Just cook it on the barbecue for four or five minutes and serve with sweet and sour sauce and a bit of chilly marinade. Or butterfly filleted. It’s a simple fish like mackerel.

“People make cooking fish harder than it is!”

It’s all hands on deck during Sustainable Seafood Week (16-24 September, 2021) as we’re celebrating the amazing efforts and hard work of the Cornwall sardine fleet and their sustainable catch. Be sure to choose MSC certified sardines when you’re shopping or eating out this week to ensure there’s seafood for future generations.