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A fisherman has described landing a rare blue lobster in Belfast Lough as the catch of a lifetime. Some marine biologists have estimated the odds of catching a blue lobster at around two million to one. Stuart Brown, 28, from Bangor, Co Down, said he could not believe his eyes when he pulled one of his lobster pots up onto the deck of his boat the Huntress last Friday. "We were sitting in about 50 to 60 feet of water and the fourth pot came up," he recalled. "I sort of saw it, but I think I thought, 'it's just...

The UK fishing industry is to benefit from an initial £2 million investment to trial new, greener engines and help create a safer, more sustainable fishing fleet as the latest round of the £100m UK Seafood Fund opens today (27 January 2022). OIder vessel engines are some of the industry’s biggest polluters and, according to a report by MARFISH, over half of the boats across the UK fishing fleet are now more than 30 years old, meaning that the annual energy use of the fleet is equivalent to that of 110,000 homes. From today, vessels in the small-scale coastal fleet can bid...

The Irish Federation of Sea Anglers are holding two shore angling sessions for young (under 16 and under 21) anglers who wish to progress in their shore angling, and possibly represent Ireland on the international stage. This is part of the IFSA CAST programme, which aims to take novice anglers to accomplished sea anglers, and to reach the highest level they can if they choose competition fishing. These are also qualifying competitions for the Irish teams (u16 and u21) which will travel to the World Championships in Holland later this year. There are two sessions, one in Leinster on the...

Ireland’s rivers teemed with salmon 30 years ago, but today numbers have declined by about 70 per cent. “Unless we can implement our conservation programme in the major catchment areas, we could be looking at a situation where we will have little or no salmon left in the wild in Ireland. It would be a terrible loss to the Irish people,” said Inland Fisheries Ireland’s (IFI) natural habitat development fisheries manager, Declan Cooke.Speaking on RTÉ's Ear to the Ground TV programme, he said water pollution was a major problem. Fencing off fields to debar cattle access to rivers would be...

The Government is to be asked to give Ireland’s inshore fishers more than €12m to help them deal with the disruption to their markets caused by the war in Ukraine and the pandemic.The market in shrimp, for example, has collapsed, with one group of around 600 smaller inshore fishers losing an estimated total of €5m in the build-up to last Christmas.Their representatives have seen more than €100m in packages to help the much larger, offshore sector boat owners deal with the negative impacts of Brexit, which is mainly the cut in quota and resulting 40% fall in income.But they say...