PW81 Julie Girl, Mikey Taylor-Firth. Single handed Cornish monk tangle net fishery. Pisces-RFR

Most large under 10m fishing boats around the UK have a crew of two or three. If you are going to successfully operate single handed, you need to be to be extremely well organised, extremely fit, and extremely targeted in what you do. Mikey Taylor-Firth, operating PW81 Julie Girl off the Lizard peninsula, is such a person, having organised and constructed the layout on the boat (including welding and boarding the pounds) for single handed operation of monk nets (only) 6-12 miles off the Lizard. On 11th October 2012, in addition to monk, there was a substantial catch of brown crab, and also lobster crawfish (all of which were borderline or undersize and returned alive), cuckoo ray, pollock and bream. Altogether, one of the tidiest operations I have evaluated for Pisces-RFR.

This is a long video for those who need to see the detail. To skip to particular bits:

00.00 - 03.30 - trip out, hauling of the first anchor line
03.30 - 15.30 - hauling and extracting from net.
15.30 - 17.40 - hauling of end anchor line, recovery of dahn buoy. At the start of the sequence Mikey explains about how the net is set, depth etc
17.40 - 19.00 - taping up of lobsters, checking catch
19.00 - 19.38 - hauling of second net - actually end of sequence, hauling the end anchor line, just for the record (I was doing stills photography during the second haul)
19.38 - 20.05 - return to sea of live crawfish, washing down deck
20.05 - 25-26 - processing of the 13 monkfish (cutting out liver, tails, cheeks) and pollock, brill etc.
25.00 - end - final wash down

For a write-up of this fishery, and the stills photography from this trip, go to the Pisces-RFR website: http://www.pisces-rfr.org/UK/Fisherie...