When I visited Achiltibuie last weekend, the community was celebrating the successes of their hard-won fight in a weekend-long Maerl and Herring festival.
They told me they have already witnessed a dramatic revival of marine life in the 10 years since their successful campaign to have dredging banned by law in a 600 sq km (150,000 acre) zone now designated a marine protected area (MPA). The seabed has been transformed, allowing scallop populations to recover.
The local rowing club says it has spotted more whales, dolphins and porpoises in the waters around the Summer Isles than before. (Scientists believe the whales are attracted by herring, once plentiful but overfished, after a large herring spawning ground was recently discovered nearby.) Gone, too, are the bitter territorial battles between the industrial dredge fishing boats and the smaller, more sustainable boats.
Sara Nason, a documentary maker, journalist and key player in the community’s fight to protect the maerl beds, told me how the protection of an area conservationist have dubbed “Scotland’s great barrier reef” began. Nason, who moved to Achiltibuie in the early 2000s, had been chatting to a local fisher around 2011, overlooking the water as a scallop dredger went by. The fisher was talking about his “hatred” of dredgers, Nason recalls, due to the damage their heavy nets cause to marine life.
Nason researched the problem and what she discovered shocked her: the slow-growing maerl beds, which provide nurseries to locally important scallops, crabs and fish, were already in poor condition. They had little chance of survival if industrial scallop dredgers were to be allowed to continue ploughing up and down the coast. Most fishers from the village and nearby Ullapool have small “creel” boats of below 150 gross tonnes, used to lay creels or pots on the seabed to collect prawns and lobsters. There are also divers, who hand pick scallops from the bottom. Both are low-impact, more sustainable methods of fishing than dredgers and trawlers.
Nason vowed to work with others in the community, including crucially, the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation, representing creelers and scallop divers, to film the damage – and gain support for the dredge ban. This was long before Ocean, David Attenborough’s documentary, showed footage of scallop dredgers bulldozing the seabed, causing damage that could be seen from space and sparking outrage.
Voluntary “no-go” zones for scallop dredgers had been set up along parts of the coast by the Scottish authorities, where the industrial boats were not supposed to enter. But Nason told me this was “impossible to police” and scallop dredgers were often seen in the bay, ignoring the voluntary ban.
Sara Nason, in the bobble hat, chats to guests at the Maerl and Herring festival. Photograph: Samuel James-Griffiths/The Guardian
