When Dave Stinson began clam diving off the coast of Norway in 2002 he was struck by the quantity of life he was seeing. Sea cucumbers, flatfish, corals, sea urchins. It reminded him of what he found off the coast of Scotland when he began diving 45 years ago. Here was a vibrant seabed, teeming with life. Unlike our own, which, he says, now often looks like the bottom of a quarry. What, he wondered, were they doing differently in Norway?
The Norwegian government has prohibited scallop dredging and bottom trawling within 12 nautical miles of the shore, with some exceptions. Such restrictions weren’t put in place for conservation reasons but to manage what are called gear conflicts, between those towing mobile gear and others with static nets.
Norway also has a 2009 Marine Resources Act, at the heart of which, according to Per Sandberg of the Norwegian fisheries agency Fiskeridirektoratet, is an ecosystems approach to fisheries, as well as a precautionary one.
Stinson is just one of an older generation of divers who are witnesses to what decades of scallop dredging and bottom trawling have done to the Scottish seabed. His early years of diving were done in the wake of the lifting in 1984 of the three-mile limit which prohibited dredgers and trawlers from round our coastlines.
2019 Herald & Times Group