Effects of trawling
In this dive made some time ago on a depth ranging from 40 to 50 meters deep we filmed the usual ghost nets lost close to a cliff at a distance of about 5 miles from the coast. We spent almost the entire dive on the rocks that despite the conditions seemed quite vital, then we met several peaks on the seabed and we have to follow them, since they did not look like the classic gillnet peaks.
We flipped for about a hundred meters in the sand and mud and several broken sea urchins, strange signs of furrows on the sandy seabed foreshadowing the umpteenth passage of a “trawler’s trawler“. Then when we found a metal ladder and a divergent from a trawl net, doubt had sadly become certainty.
Trawling is detrimental to the marine environment and ecosystem, and we will continue as far as possible to document the disasters and devastating effects that are caused by the passage of these nets. We decide to publish the video of this dive almost entirely (we cut only the most noisy parts) so that the fishermen themselves can see the state of the marine environment. The few species of fish we encountered were some mullet and some bream, is it worth it to devastate a reef and lose expensive equipment such as net, sack, divergent, lines, days of work, a lot of diesel and more for some fish ?!
We often meet fishing boats that practice trawling and we often see them approaching submerged cliffs and the coast, fishing on bottoms less than 50 meters deep and often grabbing the rocks, losing nets and equipment and sometimes suffering irreparable damage to the boat and engine .; it is now clear that this fishing is becoming increasingly unsustainable both from an environmental and economic point of view. Let us also remember that Italy has undertaken to establish marine areas protected from this type of fishing and to reconvert the fleets of trawlers towards less impacting forms of fishing (if we can say so) such as gillnets.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesca_a_strascico
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