Last time I wrote about the pollution problems of the Helford. This month we can move just round the corner to Falmouth and see the issues there. Falmouth is a spectacular natural harbour and the largest port in Cornwall. It is home to both a major industrial port and a thriving fishing industry. But, although the harbour is deep ̶ according to Wikipedia, Falmouth is the deepest port in Western Europe ̶ it is, apparently, not deep enough. The shipbuilding industry has aspirations to service ships as large as cruise liners there, so the Harbour Commissioners want to dredge a sizeable area of the channel to increase the depth from 5m to 8m: in other words, to remove 3m of spoil.
There’s the rub. To start with, the spoil has to go somewhere and that somewhere will almost certainly be the local fishing grounds. Then there is the issue of maerl, the calcified seaweed, or coralline algae, which lies along the fundus of Falmouth Harbour and for which it is famous. If the channel were to be dredged, the maerl would be taken up with it. Maerl is valuable: for many years it was dredged from the harbour for use as a fertiliser because it is high in calcium and magnesium carbonate ̶ but all that stopped in 2004. More to the point is that maerl supports the prolific fish life which sustains the Falmouth fishing industry. Like coral, to which it is similar, if disturbed it takes years to rebuild. The fishing industry in Falmouth fears that the dredging required to give life to the shipyards will signal the death knoll to fishing. Here you have all the tensions of managing a harbour today – one industry versus another, versus conservation, versus local development and employment. If Falmouth can’t dredge, would that be the end of one of the major ports on the south coast?
Nearer home Salcombe Harbour Board has been appointing new members. The terms of office of the members who were appointed after the major reorganisation in 2006 are beginning to come to the end. I was privileged to sit on the selection board and was impressed by the quality of the candidates (and the difficulty of choosing between them). But it follows that much the worst part was turning away good people; and our experience is that often they don’t reapply next time, which is galling. There were two vacancies this year and there will be three more in a year’s time, so we need the talent to keep coming!
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.