'PIRATE’ fishermen are decimating fish stocks and endangering marine wildlife in Sandown Bay, concerned anglers have warned.
But an Island fishery owner has rubbished the claims and said the impact of small commercial firms, which face strict regulations on the type and quantity of fish they can catch, was insignificant.
The Sandown Bay Protection Forum said the 'set net’ method of commercial fishing, in which large nets are weighed down with anchors to snare fish, also posed a danger to people swimming and sailing in the bay’s shallow waters.
Forum members are now calling on Sandown Town Council to support a by-law banning the use of set nets.
"The bay is absolutely littered with these nets and it can’t sustain this sort of pressure. Eighty per cent of the fish were wiped out within a year of the commercial firms moving in and that was some years ago now," said forum spokesman Dale Edmunds at last Wednesday’s town council meeting.
Although not illegal, the forum claims set net fishing is a greedy, exploitative and non-selective method in which immature fish, threatened species and marine wildlife, including dolphins and sea birds, can be snared.
"These people are more interested in making a fast profit and will net the fish until there are none left," said Mr Edmunds, who hit out at 'commercial pirates’ for depleting stocks of bream, bass and rays and destroying the flounder population by selling the fish as pot bait for ten pence each.
But Geoff Blake, of Ventnor Haven Fishery, said the forum’s claims were nonsense.
He explained the set nets, regarded as a passive method of fishing, were made of a large mesh to avoid catching immature fish, and said he had never heard of people or marine mammals getting trapped in them.
• Full story in Friday, March 19, County Press.
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emilyp@iwcpmail.co.uk