Meddle,
It does me good to sense that you’re somewhat upset !
I get upset every time I see the space you insist on typing between the last letter of the last word and the exclamation mark that rounds out the sentence. Do you type your responses on a typewriter and get a lackey transcribe them onto the Internet? :highly_amused:
So, you want to know how to patrol and therefore control the seas around our coast and protect our fishing stocks from foreign plunder.
That’s easy. I’m surprised you can’t figure it out. A modest increase in suitable long range, all weather patrol boats designed to be equipped with perhaps twenty or more GPS guided drones for aerial surveillance and equipped with video recording cameras and able to operate in most weathers and at night.
I hadn’t figured “it” out because your solution is a bunch of nonsense. Firstly the recent trend has been to sell off fishery protection vessels, not expand the fleet. Secondly, I’m not convinced the technology is currently there to maintain a swarm of marine-grade drones in proximity to one of these vessels (that, remember, also don’t currently exist). I’m sure the shipyards of Gdansk will be glad of the custom for the latter however.
I would use LiDAR or similar over video cameras, given the adverse weather conditions in the North Sea limiting visibility (you had thought of this, right?), but would these drones be constantly streaming data back to, presumably, a bustling command center on one of these modestly larger vessels? And what if it isn’t obvious that the fishing vessel under scrutiny isn’t one of ours because it is spoofing AIS data, or not broadcasting anything at all? What about battery life and contingency for when one of these drones whacks a Gannet?
Naughty foreign trawler is caught with precise evidence, nearest law boat is summoned and the naughty trawler is arrested taken to the nearest court and fined a rather large amount as a deterrent and a bond against further bad behaviour.
…or you wind up with a case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce and, if your naughty trawler-men are Spanish then you look forward to long queues forming at the border in Gibraltar.
All it takes is the will to do it.
The occultist Aleister Crowley spent a year trying to make his reflection disappear in a mirror. He gave up eventually. :stupid:
Apart from the herring disappearing as they do, our fishing fleets seemed to maintain a living pre EU. You probably know as well as I do that handing over our fishing rights to the EU was a pre-condition of joining and was in fact part of the price paid by the traitor Ted Heath for joining.
As they do? I didn’t realise you were an ecologist as well! :rolleyes: The less said about Heath and messing about on boats the better!
Fishing boats, and ocean currents, were quite different in 1973, unfortunately. Like forestry, commercial fishing is not as labour intensive now as it was in the early ’70s, and you are gambling all of this against the presumed falling price of white fish. Wojciech the riveter wants paid as well, of course.
Sign In
