Jim McFarlane has lived in Port Ellen on the southern tip of the island of Islay since he was born seven decades ago. Having fished since he was 12, he knows a thing or two about the art. And so as he explained to me how it has changed over the years, he also showed me his hand-built wooden ‘sgoth’ (Gaelic for skiff), which was the traditional Islay fishing boat for some 200 years, from the mid-eighteenth century.
But first, the changes in Islay fishing: when Jim started it was primarily for lobsters, with crab being more of a by-product. The lobsters were all sent to London, by ferry and rail, in tea-chests packed with bracken and heather. Nowadays, with lobster stocks depleted, it is crab the Islay fishermen bring in, mainly large brown crabs but also velvet crabs to which the Spaniards are partial. Since the early 1980s the vivier trucks have transported Islay shellfish to Spain. Jim tells me how he also ‘scalloped’ for 20 years, the treasured shellfish going direct to the Continent. After the ‘golden years’, as Jim calls it, from 1975 to 1985, fishing changed on Islay as everywhere else. Now stocks are depleted, most is sent off to Spain and France and there are fewer local young men who want to become fishermen any more. For the past few years, Jim has been fishing for mackerel, not to sell, but for the ‘creel boys’ to use as bait to lure the lobsters and crabs into their creels. Fortunately, however, there are more local restaurants now using Islay shellfish, such as crab claws, freshly boiled lobster and seafood platters.
