Meet the fishers

Meet the Cornwall sardine fishers

Cornish Sardines
Stefan Glinski

We go to sea out of Newlyn harbour in a ten metre vessel just before it goes dark. We find the fish with sonar and circle the net around them just as it gets dark – it’s the best time. It takes about a minute for us to shoot the nets (put them in the water) and half an hour to pull them back in again. On board, we’ve got iced-water to keep them fresh and we land at 9-10 at night. That way, they can be in restaurants the following morning – less than a half a day out of the water. We work with a 220m long ring net and we don’t normally fish more than 3-4miles off-shore. This is an active fishing method – not static. We go out there and hunt for the fish.

We fish Sunday to Thursday so the fish are fresh Monday through Friday. The sardine season is July to April, right across the winter. It’s not much fun in a small boat in winter. With bad weather it can get freezing cold. Fishing is an occupation that has its risks but that’s just part of the job. I’ve been fishing since I was 15 and I’m now 53 so it can’t be that bad! On a perfect fishing day, you go outside the harbour and find a big bunch of fish very quickly and you’re back in by 8 – home for tea.

There are three of us on each boat and I’m the Skipper of mine. She’s called Pride of Cornwall and I’ve had her for 6 years.

We started-off ring-netting for sardines about 9 years ago. There was not really market for them so we just fished to order. We’d get orders and then fish for that amount rather than just catching fish and then trying to sell them on the market. When we started you couldn’t sell more than a tonne a week now it’s over 900 tonnes a year from the certified Cornish boats. With others, that adds up to 1,600 tonnes mostly onto the UK market. 2/3 of that is fresh and the rest are frozen.