Moby Dick The Mackerel

There are some big mackerel in Lyme Bay and local fishermen report some mighty runs. So where the hell are they, wonders Nick Fisher

- Nick Fisher

It was pretty much the first thing anyone around the harbour asked. “Any mackerel about?”

To which the normal response was a grim shake of the head. Two mackerel-tripping boats went out one sunny day in early July with 10 people on board each, three times. That’s a total of 60 mackerel-hungry anglers fishing Lyme Bay for an hour each. They spent 60 man-hours of frantic feathering to catch not one single mackerel.

Nothing, anywhere. It was like a post-apocalyptic scene. A fishless sea; empty nets, empty buckets. And a big, fat, scary unanswered question: Where have all the mackerel gone?

My friend Matt blames the Spanish. Other people blame global warming. I don’t know who to blame.

By all accounts the Spanish trawlers hammered the mackerel shoals out in the Western Approaches early in the season this year. They caught hundreds of tonnes of mackerel that would normally migrate along the Channel to become our summer fun.

At the same time, the Scottish pelagic trawler fleets are saying they’ve never seen such mighty fecund runs of mackerel in decades. Scottish mackerel fishermen have experienced some of the most abounding shoals in recent memory. Which would, I guess, support the theories about warming water temperature in the south, causing most of the mackerel population to migrate north.

Short supply