CHAPTER X 



SHBIMPING AND PLAICE 



The ' shrimpers ' on the east coast sail about the nursery 

 grounds towing a beam-trawl or shank-net ^ with a mesh which 

 will catch a shrimp. It follows that they haul up on deck any 

 flat fish met with of approximately the same length as a shrimp. 

 They actually catch great numbers of ' baby ' plaice, for 

 wherever there are shrimps there will plaice fry be found. 

 Jenkins {The Sea Fisheries, p. 196) recounts that as many as 

 10,400 young plaice have been taken on the Lancashire coast 

 in a single two-hours' haul of the shrimp-trawl, which produced 

 32 quarts of shrimps (that is to say about 32 lb. weight) in 

 September. And ' the average of some hundreds of experi- 

 mental trawls extending over a period of seven years gave 

 an average of 567 plaice caught per haul.' ^ 



These fish were 1 J to 4 J inches in length — that is to say, they 

 were in their first and second summers. They were perfectl}^ 

 useless for human food. And though a certain number of them 

 survived when they were returned to the sea if the trawl was 

 hauled at half-hour intervals, and if the weather was not too 

 hot, Johnstone^ was convinced that the destruction of young 

 must be ' enormous ' and was ' probably to be measured by the 

 hundred million annually on the Lancashire coast '. 



The writer is not aware that any exact scientific experiments 

 have been made to test the destruction by shrimp trawlers 

 inside the 10-fathom line on our east coast. There is, however, 

 little question that the destruction by shrimpers at Lynn, 

 Boston, Leigh, Harwich, Grimsby, Gravesend, Whitstable, 

 Yarmouth, Margate, East Swale, and other minor ports is great. 

 The King's Lynn men, for instance, landed 665 tons of shrimps 

 in 1913. King's Lyn-n shrimpers may, therefore, have caught 

 over 19,000,000 plaice fry, or even 400,000,000 (of which the 

 majority were killed) in a year. Now the national shrimp catch 

 in i913 was 3,662 tons, valued at £67,060. Allowing for under- 

 estimation it certainly cannot be said that the fishery com- 

 pares in importance, from the point of view of food production, 

 with the 35,000 tons of plaice, worth upwards of £1,000,000. 



' The shank-net has a wooden base instead of a foot-rope (Jenkins). 

 - .Johnstone, Brilish Fisheries. ^ Ibid. 



