When you leave Rye’s Church SquareGungardens with its splendid view across the East Bank of the River Rother to Romney Marsh beyond, you come at once to the Ypres Tower. Take a sharp left turn around the corner of the tower, just before the arch into the Gungardens, and you will find yourself at the top of the Ypres Steps. Halfway down…below the Town Stocks…is the Ypres Inn. At the foot of the steps is the busy A259.

On the other side of the road is a football pitch, a putting green, the Rye Bowls Club and a children’s playground. Cross the road and keep The Salts on your left and The Chair Doctor’s workshop on your right. Ahead you will see the entrance to Rye Yacht Centre where Vemara is moored. To the left of the Boatyard Gates is a pretty red and black cottage belonging to John and Margaret Houslander. Behind Ferry Cottage is Rye's new fish quay.

Six years ago as editor of Rye Harbour Boat Owners Association’s magazine I published a Fishing Supplement. It opened with this quote: ‘Sea fisheries remain the only significant economic activity of developed countries which are a form not of harvesting or of processing, but of hunting’ and mentioned the fact that Sir Edward Heath has dismissed as ‘absurd and insulting’ the notion that he had betrayed the country’s fishermen. Insulting - yes. Absurd - no.

Four years ago the Public Forum Supplement to the last RHBOA magazine under my editorship…Number 94...included a defensive letter to the Rye Observer from John Morgan…Area Navigation Manager for the Environment Agency alongside a blistering attack on the Environment Agency from Rye’s Labour MP Michael Foster who described the delays and overspending as ‘a cock-up on a par with the overspend on London’s Jubilee Line’.

Here is an extract from John Morgan’s letter: ‘We have taken this opportunity to carry out a strategic review and to assess the value of the harbour to the local community. This will provide a sound basis for seeking investment for the Rye Fish Quay from other outside funding partners. Duncan Grant going into receivership may have caused us delays anyway as some of the land needed for the development is tied up in his leasehold.’

Mr Foster was not amused and had this to say: ‘I am furious and want to know how it could have happened. I led a delegation of fishermen to Parliament myself. The money was agreed and everything was in place. They have already spent £ 800 000 on Admiralty Jetty and it is nowhere near enough to upgrade the fishing quay. I don’t know whether it is the Environment Agency or its Consultants who are to blame but the whole thing smacks of maladministration and negligence and I want some straight answers. How can you start work without having the correct figures? I want to know what is different now to what they already knew before they started work. I feel incandescent with rage. The people of Rye and the fishermen deserve better. It is an enormous disappointment and continues to put our fishermen at risk working on a quay which falls well below EU standards. The quay will be improved. It has to happen; it is just a case of when and how.’ Mike Foster turned out to be correct.

The Simmons Quay opened on 14th July this year…named after Ronnie Simmons the Fisherman’s Representative who devoted ten years of his life to banging heads together and refusing to be fobbed off by bureaucratic excuses. It is a remarkable success story and one that Rye can take pride in. Several times a week French trucks load up. A regular visitor is Comptoir de Marée du Marche Commun of 23-25 Rue G. Honoré, 62200 Boulogne-sur-mer who makes pick-ups all along the English South Coast…Shoreham, Brighton, Newhaven, Eastbourne, Hastings, Rye, Hythe, Folkestone, Dover and Ramsgate before heading for the Cross-Channel Ferries or the Channel Tunnel.

Nearly all of England’s cod is brought into the ports of Grimsby and Hull from Norway, Iceland and the Faeroe Islands. Our local waters are not cold enough for cod. They lay their temperature-sensitive eggs just beneath the surface. Boulogne is the biggest fish market in Europe and this is where fish landed in Rye goes. For years Brian Stent fished out of Rye on Akela. This year for the first time he has seen red mullet and swordfish landed at Rye. At 13 my father started work in London’s Billingsgate Fish Market. He would have approved of Rye’s new fish quay.

Last Thursday a huge whale was washed up on Camber Sands. The local paper spoke to the Dover Coastguards who reckoned it was too big to be a Minky Whale and unlikely to be a Humpback. The Daily Mirror had no doubts. At 55 feet it was a Fin Whale…the second largest animal on Earth. It was missing its lower jaw and tail…hit by a ship said the Mirror…and had lost its skin which is what whales do when they die. It had been dead for several weeks.

The inshore waters around the British Isles are teeming with wildlife. Dolphins are being brought ashore in fishermen’s nets along the Dorset Coast and all along the East Coast seals are flourishing...so much so that the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St Andrews University decided to take a look at the situation. They estimate that grey seals are eating 8000 tons of North Sea cod a year…4% of the total catch and four times as much as 20 years ago.

Predictably this prompted the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation to call for the grey seals to be culled…and Animal Welfare Groups to call for the fishermen to be culled instead. ‘Shame seals don’t look like toads’ and ‘they may look cuddly but they’re vermin’ gives the flavour of the debate. The last official Seal Cull in Britain was 30 years ago. Seals are smart hunters. They swim together to corral the cod before swallowing as many as they can.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is torn between protecting the interests of our fishermen and kow-towing to meddling outside interests like the European Fisheries Commission in Brussels and the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas. These organisations bribe scientists with research grants to report declining fish stocks and recommend quotas and other bureaucratic devices to enhance their power over our fish. Here are two typical reports. The first is the EU 2004 Cod Recovery Plan which claims the right to limit catches by EU Member States to 26 500 tonnes a year and seeks to control how much time boats can spend at sea. The second is an article in Science by Professor Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax Nova Scotia.

The EU Plan reports that twice the approved catch was accidentally caught last year as bycatches by fishermen chasing other species. The idea of bycatches is a silly bureaucratic invention. Down go the nets and into them go the fish. Cod are bigger than haddock, whiting, hake and plaice so in they go too. Ban all fishing is the official response.

Boris has a computer so he prophesies. By 2048 every seafood species in his 100 fishing regions will have collapsed and no longer be commercially viable. The Global Fishing Fleet is two and a half times its sustainable level. North Atlantic Fish Stocks are a sixth of what they were 100 years ago. The Global Cod Catch is down two thirds from three million tons in 1970. Naughty Russian Trawlers are illegally catching 100 000 tons of cod in the Barents Sea. Bluefin Tuna catches in the Mediterranean are 60% above quota. Overexploitation is up 150% since 1970. And so on.

Over the years sheep on the Falkland Islands taught themselves to avoid Man by keeping out of rifle range. No doubt fish have also learnt a few tricks…like diving deeper and reacting to the tell-tale signs of approaching trawlers. The ocean’s currents shift too. The decline of the Hansa in the Middle Ages can be traced to a shift in the ocean currents which took the herring with them. And Quota Regimes cause shifts in recorded and unrecorded catches. If the statistics are unreliable…and EU’s Auditors and the European Parliament do not hold Eurostat in very high regard…then garbage in will produce garbage out with computers churning more of it much faster. There are fundamental flaws in Fish Stock Counts. The methodology is poor. Conceptual grids are stretched over the oceans, hypothetical boxes are created and the fish in the boxes counted. Keep still! We’re trying to count you!.

Anecdotal evidence is mounting. Fish move faster than scientists. The vessels of the Rye Fishing Fleet pass a few feet from my stern several times a week. I have been talking to them. They know their business and they are doing very nicely thank you. Fishermen and divers are reporting record numbers of codling and growing numbers of juvenile cod. Methinks that the best way to help our fishermen would be to get out of their way and let them get on with it.