Quote:
| Originally Posted by drysuit repair dave The thing is , the dredging ban is coming anyway,it is completely separate to the proposed scallop diving ban, so the bottom habitat will be protected whatever happens. There are also 2 commercial scallop divers working in the area (doing no environmental damage and providing an alternative to dredged scallops) who would be put out of business if the second proposal went through
The proposed scallop diving ban is (in my opinion) purely a sop to the commercial fishing industry, a "well its ok, if you cant have them, no one can" gesture. It is part of a wider pattern, that assumes large scale commercial fishermen have more rights to take from the sea than anyone else
The announcement on the Cornwall Sea Fisheries website cites an opinion piece from "Fishing News" (a newspaper for the commercial fishing industry) as its justification for banning diving for scallops. This is like quoting the Daily Mail to justify immigration laws 
cheers
dave drysuitrepair.co.uk |
Fair comment. I scallop dive myself, season opened here on Saturday but it's highly regulated in terms of what you can catch, 50 a day, possession limit of 100 and we dio extensive pre-season surveys toi help gauge the impact of recreational diver impacts.
We are going through an MPA process here too and our club have really gone out on a limb to support extensive no-take areas, in the face of virulent opposition from commercial and amateur fishing interests, who are trying to portray us all as a bunch of yoghurt knitting lentil munchers.
Unfortunately, our case for saving areas of representative biohabitat (the last of their kind on the planet due to our geographic location) are somewhat undermined by the fact that the vast majority of our fellow divers are primarily hunter-gatherers - amateur hookah divers outnumber SCUBA divers here by around 4 to 1.