The Wild Hunt - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 18

my boat in a column just a yard wide, heading away from land. The
mackerel came up sporadically, in twos and threes. A driftline per-
haps, which could explain why the predators had clustered around
this strip: the plankton, like the jellyfish, had been corralled by a gen-
tle rip tide, and the bait fish had followed them.
I watched the moon jellies rolling over each other like bubbles in a
lava lamp. At one point the procession broke. There were a few yards
of clear water, then I was startled by a monstrous ghostly jelly, pale
and hideous, leading the next battalion. It took me a moment to see
that it was a white plastic bag, parachuted taut in the water, the jelly-
fish king whose subjects followed him out to sea.
I drifted with them, sawing the line up and down. When I paddled,
the jellyfish bumped against the line, causing me to stop and test the
signal, to see what manner of life was tapping out its message from
the gloom. I searched in vain for a baitball.
As usual in such matters, there were as many opinions about why the
mackerel had scarcely appeared this year as there were people to ask.
A local fishmonger told me with great authority that a monstrous new
ship was operating in the Irish Sea, fishing not with a net but with a
vacuum tube that sucked up the mackerel and everything else that
came its way, which it turned into fishmeal for use as fertilizer and
animal feed. It had been licensed by the Environment Agency to catch
500 tonnes of mackerel a day, and had received a £13 million subsidy
from the European Commission. I checked this story and soon dis-
covered that the Environment Agency has no jurisdiction at sea, that
vacuum tubes are used not for fishing but for sucking the catch out of
the nets, that there is no such fishmeal operation in the Irish Sea and
that no boat is licensed to take such a tonnage. Otherwise the explan-
ation was impeccable.
Others blamed the dolphins which, they said, had come into the
bay in greater numbers than usual this year (the records suggested
otherwise), or the north-west winds that had predominated since
the end of May and were alleged to have broken up the shoals. Some
people pointed to the black landings by a group of crooked fishermen
in Scotland (they took £63 million-worth of over-quota mackerel and
herring 1 ); others to the failure by the European Union, Norway, Ice-