Panning for the sea's gold or dredging up a controversy?

The commercial scallop fleet, accused by some of raping and pillaging the sea floor in its quest for shellfish, began to fish in Queen Charlotte Sound this week. BLAIR ENSOR spends a day on the Falcon, one of the boats dredging in the area, to gauge a fisherman's perspective.

The commercial scallop boats are like bees around a honey pot.

The waters of Ship Cove in Queen Charlotte Sound have been cluttered with 16 vessels since daybreak. They weave perilously close to one another, dredging the sea floor.

"It's normally not this hectic. It's normally a bit more spread out," says Grant Orr, skipper of the Falcon, as he grabs an undersized scallop from a mountain on the sorting table and flicks it overboard.

Trailing behind his rustic 14.4-metre boat, which is based out of Nelson, are two dredges. They are both 2.3m wide, weigh about 300 kilograms and are towed at about 3 knots. A pressure plate at the mouth of each dredge is angled towards the sea floor and follows in the path of a "tickler chain", which stirs the scallops up before they are collected in a bag made of steel rings.

The dredges are all very similar, with slight variations in shape and how people choose to run the chain, he says.

The fishing depth varies between about 14m and 24m, and the cable towing the dredges is three times as long.

Every 20 minutes, the dredges are lifted and the catch is emptied in front of three young crew, whose hands swoop on the table, returning to the ocean any scallops under 90 millimetres.

Mr Orr says the bycatch is "very minimal".

It can include the odd flatfish, starfish and small shark.

"It's like panning for little gold nuggets, and you don't get sick of them," says Brett Waterhouse, 24, as he rakes scallops closer to his corner for grading.

He has just finished his offshore master's ticket, which will allow him to take charters 200 miles out to sea. Working on the scallop boat is paying off the three-month course.

To his right is Aleisha Turner, 18, a trained hairdresser, whose long, blond hair is hidden away under a black beanie.

The work is monotonous, but "I'd rather be out here than sitting in an office on my arse ... everyone's got to pay bills, eh.

"There's lots of bullsh... on land. Scalloping is just calming really, you know," she says.

Directly opposite her is baby-faced Sam Crabb, 14, who cops plenty of flak from the others for sizing scallops slowly. He found himself in a bit of trouble at school, and being out at sea keeps him on the straight and narrow.

In the past, Mr Orr has had an older crew, but he says the current lot keep him young. "Speed is the issue, but numbers make up for that," he says.

A mechanic by trade, Mr Orr took over his stepfather's business when he retired in 1992. He also works periodically as a boat engineer.

"I'm one of the lucky ones in the fleet who has options," he says. "I could tie this up and go back to making $100,000 a year."

In the off-season, the Falcon is also used for set netting and chasing albacore tuna.

Mr Orr, along with four other skippers, took a punt coming to Ship Cove, a natural scallop bed, leaving behind the best fishing he had seen in Guards Bay for 12 years. They made the journey around Cape Jackson on Sunday night, fending off a howling 50-knot southerly to stake out the quality and quantity of shellfish in Queen Charlotte Sound. The decision paid off. "The scallops are just bloody beautiful – the best I've ever seen in Ship Cove."

Seven more boats joined them on Monday and an additional four on Tuesday, a far cry from the 30 boats out of a fleet of 64 that fished the area in the mid-1990s.

"You come into a different world when you come here. Ferries, pleasure boats and loopies. You've got to keep your wits about you."

Last month, environmental group Guardians of the Sounds warned it would protest with a flotilla of "100 boats" against any commercial scallop fishing in Queen Charlotte Sound.

Spokesman Peter Beech has called dredging "legalised vandalism of our ecosystem", and says it is wrecking a "recreational playground" and the local tourism industry.

Others, such as Dolphin Watch Ecotours owner Dan Engelhaupt, believe species of dolphins disappear when the scallop fleet arrives, but no protesters have confronted the fleet this season.

"They [those who threaten to protest] just don't know how silly they are," says Mr Orr.

He is not disputing that dredges damage the bottom. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that you are dragging something around that is going to disturb stuff," but the areas have been dredged for so long now that the seabed has been changed to "something we can fish".

Dredging is like "ploughing a paddock", says Mr Orr, who likens the scallop beds to cleared farmland with "sheep running around on it".
Dredging is "the best way of retrieving scallops from the bottom".
Environ-mentalists, however, compare dredging to cutting down a tree to get an apple.

"We were given the right by the Government to fish this area under the Quota Management System in 1986, and we have given away so much since then.

"There are no cowboys any more, and it's a professionally run operation."

Challenger Scallop Enhancement Company, a co-operative of scallop quota owners in the Marlborough Sounds, Tasman Bay and Golden Bay, shares responsibility with the Ministry of Fisheries for managing the commercial scallop fishery in the top of the south.

The company has a voluntary agreement to fish two areas in Queen Charlotte Sound, Ship Cove and Dieffenbach.

Grant Orr says that represents only 9 per cent of the original area, which was allocated to be commercially fished, "which is a minute area".

Also, the commercial fleet has agreed not to fish Dieffenbach until the area has been surveyed by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, and this has not yet been done.

Challenger chairman Buzz Falconer says there will be no fishing in Dieffenbach until next season.

The rest is available for recreational fishermen, who Mr Orr says collectively do as much damage as the commercial fleet.
"I'm a recreational fisherman at heart.

"We actually love getting a blue cod with the kids or a snapper. I think there is room for a little bit of everything everywhere," he says.
"People blame dredging for reducing the fishery. I blame Mr Furuno [fish finders].

"We are not interested in wrecking it, we want to look after it because we want to do it next year and the year after."

Scallops have a life expectancy of only about five years, so if they are not harvested, they will die, he says.

A three or four-day "sting" on Ship Cove would leave a lot of young shellfish behind, he says.

The fleet could stay for a longer period and try to get all the legal-sized fish, but that would involve turning the smaller scallops over repeatedly, he said.

"Some say it's silly to leave them [scallops] here, but it's silly to turn them over and kill them."

Mr Orr says surveys grossly underestimated the number of scallops in Ship Cove, which led to a quota of 10 tonnes. However, next season's fishermen will reap the benefits of that.

The area has delivered excellent-quality shellfish, which have cut about 80 to the kilogram all season.

Despite this, he says scallop fishing is not very lucrative for him. Each day about 200kg of scallop meat is taken from his boat for processing. He has a season quota of four tonnes.

At about $18 a kilogram, that may sound really good, he says, but once you take into account the company levies and the fee he pays to lease his quota from his stepfather and another from a consortium of marine farmers, his take is reduced to about $11 a kg.

Increases to the price of petrol and food have pushed up his operating costs by about $100 a week, which "takes a fair bit of the fun out of it", but he wouldn't have it any other way.

"Even though I'm making no money, it's been really pleasant. Fishing has been easy and everything has gone well."

- The Marlborough Express