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These guidelines are intended to assist fishermen with the rigging and use of square-mesh panels in compliance with current fisheries regulations (Square-Mesh Panel Council Reg. (EC) No 850/98. The Sea Fish (Specified Sea Areas) (Regulation of Nets and Other Fishing Gear) (Scotland) Order 2000 No.227)and The Sea Fish (Specified Sea Areas) (Regulation of Nets and Other Fishing Gear) Order 2001 No.649).

Seafish Coverless Prawn Trawl Design & Construction Guidance Notes.

Coverless Nephrops Trawl Design and Construction. These guidance notes resulted from the work carried out and reported in SR532 and SR542.

Commercial proving trials of a new prawn trawl design.

A comprehensive guide to commercial fishing methods. This publication contains illustrations and descriptions of commonly used fishing methods, gears and rigs.

There is a recognised problem surrounding the issue of discarding whitefish in the Farne Deeps Nephrops fishery. Both local fishermen and DEFRA are aware of the need to make changes to current operations and are committed to reducing discards while encouraging the take up of technical conservation methods. This project explores the potential for reducing the fishing effort on cod, haddock and whiting by increasing the earning potential for the Nephrops catch component with a live (tubed) landing regime. Overall, this project was an industry lead responsible fishing initiative leading to a more sustainable fishery. ^Keywords: Nephrops, Farne Deeps, whitefish discard reduction, sustainable fishery

This report presents stage 3 of Project Inshore where findings of stage 1’s data gathering on fisheries within each IFCA and the results of stage 2’s MSC pre-assessment conducted for fisheries around England’s coast (involving over 400 different species, stock and gear combinations) are considered to provide a Strategic Sustainability Review tailored to the Northumberland IFCA.

A report of the Study Group on Electrical Trawling (SGELECTRA).

The study covered fisheries from northwest Norway through the North Sea, English Channel/la Manche, Cantabrian Sea and Algarve to the French Mediterranean. It was carried out as a series of tasks. Task 1, preparation, involved reviewing each partner’s national fisheries and establishing liaison groups of fishermen and other industry members; Task 2, quantifying lost gear, required the partners to interview fishermen to establish their experiences of gear loss and then the survey the areas where losses were reported; Task 3, physical evolution, started with the retrieval of ‘naturally lost’ gears and then moved on to a series of exercises simulating gear loss and monitoring how the ‘lost’ gears changed over time; Task 4, ecosystem impacts, involved interpreting catch data from the experimental gears, raising the data to métier level and comparing the results to targeted commercial catches; Task 5, mitigating measures, established a sub-group to look at the ways in which gear loss is treated elsewhere, matched those approaches to the European fisheries and assessed the likely benefits of alternate strategies; Task 6, ran throughout the project and involved industry liaison, reporting and other dissemination. The work required a relatively high level of industry liaison. In practical terms this meant that each national partner set up a national advisory group (NAG) to guide the work and to ensure that the sea trials and recommendations were representative and realistic. The NAGs were mainly made up of experienced skippers but also included net riggers and other professionals as appropriate. This report, wherever possible, follows the sequence of tasks described above.