Traditional Fishing Methods Still Used on British Coasts

Small Boats, Long Memories

Walk the quay at Brixham, Newlyn, Whitby or Kinlochbervie as the light comes up and you will still see it: a handful of men and women, mostly in boats under ten metres, hauling gear their grandfathers would recognise. The fleet has shrunk, the paperwork has grown, and the fish themselves have shifted north and west as the sea warms. Yet the techniques underneath — pot, line and net — have proved remarkably stubborn. They are cheap to run, gentle on the seabed and endlessly adaptable, which is why they remain the backbone of inshore fishing around the British Isles.

Pots and Creels: Fishing That Waits

Potting is the quietest method on the coast. A baited trap is shot on a string, left to fish with the tide, and hauled a day or two later. Nothing is dragged, nothing is churned, and unwanted catch can usually be returned alive.

Around the south-west, parlour pots for brown crab and lobster are worked in strings of twenty to fifty, often on ground the skipper has fished for decades — a patch of reef, a gully, or the edge of a wreck that never appears on a chart. In Scotland, creels take velvet crab, lobster and langoustine, with fleets shifted according to the moult. Escape gaps and soft-eye panels let undersized stock out, and many skippers return berried hens after notching the tail: a small V-shaped cut that marks a breeding female for years and tells the next fisher to put her back.

• Bait matters. Salted mackerel, dogfish and gurnard heads all fish well and hold on the hook through a tide.
• Soak time is a judgement call. Too long and the catch is damaged by crabs; too short and you have wasted a shot.
• Weather sets the rhythm. Most inshore boats work within a few hours of shelter, so a rising swell means gear comes ashore before pride does.

Handlines and Longlines

Handlining for mackerel is the oldest pleasure in the trade. A string of feathers or a single baited hook, a lead heavy enough to reach the shoal, and a slow drift across a tide line that is holding bait — that is the whole method. It is also the most selective: the fish is hooked, not netted, and can be returned unharmed if it is the wrong size or the wrong species.

Longlining takes the same principle further. A ground line of several hundred hooks on short snoods is baited with squid and mackerel strip, shot on the ebb and hauled on the flood. In the south-west it is used for hake, ling and conger; in the north, for haddock and dogfish. It is hard, wet work at the rail, but line-caught fish often fetch a better price because the flesh arrives unbruised.

Nets, Haaf and Coracle

Nets are the most misunderstood gear on the coast. A well-set net is not a wall; it is a calibrated filter. Mesh size is chosen to the species and the season, and the skipper reads tide, depth and ground before shooting.

• Trammel nets fish for flatfish and rays on sandy ground, where the bagging of the fine inner panel holds the fish.
• Tangle nets take monkfish and spiders on rough, rocky ground where a trawl could not be worked at all.
• Haaf nets — a deep, shield-shaped net held on a pole while the fisher stands chest-deep in the Solway — are still licensed for salmon, with the tide doing the work.
• Coracle netting on the Teifi and Towy for sewin is kept alive by a small number of families, each boat carried on the shoulder.

On the Severn, the old putcher ranks of basket traps are now heritage rather than commerce, but they remain a useful reminder that British fishers were building selective, low-impact gear long before the phrase existed.

Quotas, Licences and a Warming Sea

The modern rules are part of the job. A vessel licence, a catch limit and, in some cases, a set number of days at sea all shape what a skipper can shoot and when. Because much shellfish sits outside quota, many inshore boats have shifted their effort into crab, lobster and whelk — a sensible move, but one that puts pressure on grounds where potting was once a sideline.

The stocks themselves are moving. Warming water has brought red mullet, squid, cuttlefish and John Dory into the Channel and the Irish Sea, while cold-water species edge further north. Fishers who once threw cuttlefish back now land them, and a few have started targeting squid in winter when the traditional season is thin. Prices, too, have changed the shape of the day: direct sales, boxes to local restaurants and shellfish sent live to market all reward careful handling over sheer volume, which suits small crews well.

Passing the Skills On

None of this survives on nostalgia. It survives because someone is shown how to splice a warp, mend a net in the shed on a wet afternoon, read a tide race and remember a mark by lining up a church tower with a headland. Those skills are passed on in harbour stores, on shared quays and through apprenticeships that pair a young skipper with an experienced one.

The gear is simple; the judgement is not. That is the real heritage of the British coast — not the baskets and the oilskins in a museum case, but the daily decision about where to shoot, how long to wait and when to steam home. So long as small boats keep making those calls, the old methods will keep earning their place.