Today, we’re out at sea with a young contributor who is a very keen fisherman. Given his young age, his identity will remain a mystery but, at 16 he’s onto his second boat and when we asked him how others could get into the fishing industry, he said: ‘Just Give It a Bash’.

Now a full time fisherman, he is out catching lobster and velvet crab and making a good living while doing something he loves; being on boats. It started with a few creels off the rocks below his granny’s house and eventually, this hobby turned into a livelihood; the rest is history.

“I was probably maybe 9 or 10 and I was just bored. So me and my cousin decided to get some creels and we were throwing them off the shore and then we started getting stuff.”

That summer turned into many. Then our contributor and his cousins got more creels, more stuff, and then got to work. 

‘My uncle bought me a boat. It was an 18-foot boat. And so me and my cousin, in the summer, were messing around with it all the time.’

Lesson learnt, we should all be good to our uncles. On this boat, the boys lifted creels, caught a few fish and really got a taste for the sea and the rhythm of the tide. The following year, he went on to get another boat. As that boat came ashore for the winter, the work wasn’t over. He painted it up himself and launched it again in March 2024 and since then, it’s onwards and upwards, as he’s now moved on to a newer boat.

“It’s a wooden boat, a clinker boat.”

It was our young fisherman’s uncles who gave him his first real start on the water and have taught him the ropes as he’s grown up. He says that they:

“were always showing me and teaching me, really. Even on a bad day we’d decide that we’d face the bad weather all the time and just learn to work with it. Practice makes perfect, they say.”

He’s got all his tickets now after being in Stornoway for a 3 week course that showed him more of what goes on in the fishing world behind the scenes. These tickets include; sea survival, firefighting, first aid, safety awareness.

“There’s a lot more to it than just going out with a couple of creels and a boat.”

When a catch is landed in Uist, it gets sorted into sizes and weights and stored in tanks before it is shipped off from the island every Monday. This shellfish is then driven to the South of England before being sold to market in either France or Spain.

So, next time you’re enjoying a Paella on the Costa Del Sol, it could well have come off a Uist fishing boat. In saying that, he says that he’s never spotted his own lobster on holiday, but he wonders if folk in Europe know the distance it’s travelled.

 

 

“They always go on about how it’s the best seafood in the world that comes from the Scottish waters. Pretty much everything that’s caught in Scotland goes abroad. It’s about 5% of it that stays in Scotland.” 

The work’s not easy. But it’s honest. And it can pay. But, even so, there aren’t many young people joining this industry these days.

“You can make a very, very good living from it. Yeah, it’s a lot of hard work, I think for the whole of Uist and Barra, there’s only maybe 10 people my age, maybe 8 fishing or that want to fish.”

Even with the dwindling number of young people out fishing, the community is still strong, even if the numbers are thinning. People do help each other and our young fisherman wants more young people to get involved so that Uist, Barra and Eriskay’s fishing story doesn’t end sooner than it should. Asking him again how people can get into fishing, he says:

“Oh, just go and ask somebody. Just say, ‘Can I go fishing with you?’ You’ve got to get stuck in and you’ve got to just give it a bash, really.

I love being out on boats and I wouldn’t do anything else.”