Global Greenhouse - Cold Catch
An interview with Noel Cattermole, Sizewell Fisherman
Some time back in the mid 1980s Noel Cattermole first noticed something odd was happening with the fishing stock on his inshore patch off Sizewell. The water was warming. So, the cod he had been accustomed to catching for years started to become sparse, to be replaced by sea bass – a fish with more of a penchant for luxuriating in the tepid bath temperature of Greek fish farms.
Being a man who spends his whole working life outside and close to the elements which shape all our lives, Noel also noticed that the house martins which used to return annually to nest in the eave in their beautiful mud cup nests above his porch on the Sizewell shingle beach weren’t visiting any more.
Martins require mud to build on return from their winter residence in Africa. They gather soft earth to build their temporary homes. Long, dry spells with little or no rain, such as the ones East Anglia has been recently experiencing, mean that the pools and puddles where the house martins usually collect this mud have dried up. No mud, no chicks.
Cattermole is now 71, although could pass for a dozen years younger. He has a wife, Pat, four children and eight grandchildren. On the day we meet he and Pat are caring for Barry aged two and a half. Noel has big auburn eyebrows and a fresh scar on the top of his head from a skin cancer removed during surgery in January of this year. He doesn’t like caps to keep the sun’s rays off his body but has agreed to wear a posh Australian suntan cream in future.
He wasn’t destined for the sea. From inland Suffolk, he was a smart kid, getting into the grammar school in Leiston via the 11 Plus. But it didn’t agree with him: “They were the worst years of my life,” he winces. Instead, he headed East and made friends with the fleet of Sizewell fishermen including Jack Friar who made Noel his first 18-foot wooden boat in 1970. It was in larch. A Peter Grimes or Billy Budd boat. “It was a bootiful time,” he pronounces the word as Bernard “the turkey” Matthews did in his winsome ads of yore.
Noel had the knack almost immediately, catching good quantities of plaice, Dover sole, crabs, and lobsters. “I had a natural aptitude, and it was a decent living,” he recalls. “There were no fishing quotas, no limits and very little in the way of regulation. I just got on with it.”
He ventures a maximum of eight miles from shore. In his record year during a Winter in the early 1980s, he caught 130 stones of cod and 100 stones of sprats in a single day. “I would have been out from first light until after dark – 14/16 hours. It was worth it.” His record was 350 days on the water in one year.
Nowadays the catches are far more modest – maybe 20 stones of crabs in a week. A stone is 6.35 kilos. Or, in old money, 14 pounds.
“You feel as a fisherman that you’re like a cat – a natural survivor,” he says. “Also catlike, I never liked to be told what to do. I was somewhat solitary. I don’t like bosses – the sea is my boss. And it doesn’t give a monkey’s about you.”
And although he counts fellow fisherpeople as friends and has a drink with them there is no doubt that it’s a cod-eat-cod world out there. “You don’t speak to each other at sea. We tell each other lies about where the fish are to put rivals off the scent.” Except that now post-Covid and post-Brexit he is the last professional fisherman left at Sizewell. So, there are not many rivals to talk to, anyway.
And there are now the post-Brexit rules to contend with. Like 95% of UK fishermen, Noel voted to Leave despite warnings from pescatarian economists such a move would resemble a lobster walking willingly into a pot followed by the inevitable boiling water. There was to be no “taking back control.” He is banned from taking sea bass from February to March to preserve stocks. So, when we meet in late February he is twiddling his thumbs and mending broken lobster pots. He complains that HMG airborne drones now watch him to ensure his life jacket is on – no jacket a fine. First offence: a thousand pound fine. Health and safety czars might argue such rules are actually a good idea as Noel concedes, “I've never actually been very good at swimming.”
“Since Brexit we’ve been demonised. The rules and regulations have increased rather than vice versa,” he says. Take back control is a phrase which makes him wince now. “We were so naive. It’s twice as bad now as before 2016.”
The main battles with the UK Department of Transport were over his scuppers. Scuppers are an age-old design involving a slit cut in the side of a boat to enable water taken on board during a splashy launch from the beach to drain out naturally. They were deemed not safe. “Cost me around fifty thousand to keep them happy. I had to buy pumps, steel tanks, the lot.” But he didn’t allow himself to get scuppered. He’s cussed.
The great irony is that the fishing history hereabouts is very rich, not least at Lowestoft, which was huge at the peak of the herring fishery of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But there were also the small ports and beach-launching places where small boats chased different species at different times of the year, working the seasons with pots and nets and lines, and earning and spending in local economies, and giving work opportunities to local people who cemented the communities together.
It was 110 years ago when a mixed fleet of more than a thousand steam and sailing drifters landed over 840,000 crans of herring at Great Yarmouth. A cran being 28 stones or 177.8 kilos. At Lowestoft, there were 350 English boats and 420 Scottish, which brought home around 535,000 crans in 1913.
“Herring?” he asks,” I get a few but nobody wants them these days. They go into pet food or to feed seals in zoos.” And don't get him started on seals. He wants a cull because the North Sea is now crawling with them, like elephants in Africa. “Why conserve seals? Would you put a fox in a chicken coop? When it comes to the environment and sustainability, I think young people have been brainwashed.” Talking to him reminds one that little is cut and dry in the sustainability world. Winners create losers.
He’d love to take a few youngsters out on his boat and teach them the ropes and some home truths but that’s forbidden, as well, because they wouldn’t have the requisite Health and Safety paperwork. “I was reading a story in The Fishing News the other day about a fish inspector in Brazil who got beheaded.” His exasperation doesn’t extend quite that far… And regulation. “Regulation means I can only fish alone now. The numbers don’t work for two people. If I fell overboard with my swimming ability there would be nobody to pull me out. Is that what regulations were supposed to achieve? Regulation has made it less not more safe”.
So, 2040. How does he see the future? For once one encounters a sense of optimism. “I want to get my boy established. He’s 40 now and runs the cafe on the seafront but he’s got his tickets and wants to go to sea. Having said that, I'm fit and I’d go mad if I couldn't go out on the water any more. I still love it. It would be nice to go out together. I liked that a lot.”
In the meantime, he has a tip for us consumers when handling his catch which he sells from a hut next to his house. “Always test the fish on ice. It draws down the flavour. Makes it neat and white. And Dover sole? Don’t worry about eating it fresh. It tastes at its best up to a week old.”