Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 257

belonging - would remain with me. I had found hope where hope had
seemed absent.
Salmon are not the only fish which, in some parts, are beginning to
recover. While the bottom-dwelling creatures of the sea cannot
rebound without the closure of fishing grounds, some of the pelagic
animals - those unattached souls which haunt the middle reaches of
the sea - have begun, in a few places, to demonstrate the remarkable
capacity of marine life to reappear when conditions change. The ces-
sation of the fishmeal operations in the Irish Sea and elsewhere, and
the gradual, partial recovery of the herring population, has attracted
back into our waters animals which were once common here.
In 2009 a lone killer whale joined the dolphins that reside in Car-
digan Bay. At one point it turned up half a mile off the beach at
Llansglodion. A small pod - always accompanied by the same large
male - has now appeared off the coast of Pembrokeshire every May
for the past eight years. Minke and in whales have arrived in the
same seas in numbers unknown for decades. In 2011 the fins - - the
second-largest animals ever to have darkened the planet - began, for
the first time in living memory, disporting themselves off Pembroke-
shire in the winter as well as the summer. 84 Later that year, twenty-one
of them were seen in the Celtic Deep. 85 In 2005 a humpback whale
was spotted off the seaboard of Wales. Two others arrived in the Irish
Sea in 2010; one was filmed breaching three miles off the Irish coast. 86
I dream of the day on which I kayak among them.
From the North Sea come, once more, reports of gigantic fish ham-
mering the mackerel shoals off the Yorkshire coast, and occasionally
stripping all the line off an unsuspecting angler's reel: though the
bluefin tuna is critically endangered, some among the depleted popu-
lation are again following their prey into these waters. 87 A few years
ago a much commoner tunny, the albacore or longfin, began harrying
the herring off the coast of Ireland. In three consecutive years, fisher-
men had reported shoals of albacore, some leaping clear of the water,
less than a mile from the coast on which I live. It was this latter intel-
ligence which led me into the stupidest and most dangerous adventure
upon which I had embarked for, oh, at least a month.