Glenarm salmon farm jellyfish massacre. Sea in crisis.

You want to avoid the rant, the story is here.

Funny how small things can affect you (bear with me here, there is meat after the reminiscences). Last year I skippered a youth sail training boat for Ocean Youth Trust Ireland, and our fave port was Glenarm Bay, Co Antrim, Northern Ireland. We’d regularly come in late at night or in the early hours of the morning, knackered, utterly knackered and we’d moor ourselves alongside the boat which serviced the Glenarm Bay salmon farms whose pens were out in the bay (we were too big to go in a normal marina berth).

The life of a sail training skipper is an exhausting one, and a couple of times I woke up with Four Sisters (my boat) tied up alongside the pontoon, the considerate salmon farm service boat skipper having slipped his boat out without fuss, without waking me (as was his right) and having pulled us close alongside and tied us up. He never got narked finding us moored outside him, when he moved us he tried not to wake me (and when you’re psychotic with tiredness, that makes him a prince among men) and was always, always a gent.

A vast jellyfish swarm has just swamped the farm and killed all the salmon.

Glenarm is a lovely spot, with an obliging harbourmaster, stunning surroundings and friendly, truly friendly locals.

Being a zoology graduate (with a sprinkling of marine biol) sailor, you care about what holds your hull up, and what lives in that there water. And you notice things. Your feelings are not peer reviewed, but after 25 years of sailing, fishing, talking to sailors and fishermen, still dipping into one’s Levinson’s great textbook on marine biology, and reading the occasional science blog, there is some authority to them.

For years I have seen cod stocks decline, the lobsters rise and crash and looked in the passing water and thought…there’s a shitload of jellyfish in there. More than I can remember in the past…and the next year thought yet more than I can remember in the past.

And today I think of my old friends in Glenarm looking at a ruined crop of salmon, suffocated by a jellyfish bloom of astonishing size. It covered 10 square miles of sea, and the ‘rescuers’ (I bet my mate was driving that boat) tried to do something, but the small jellyfish would have been sucked into the engine in the cooling water and the engines would overheat.

I have always said that if a boat doesn’t have sails and sodding great big keel, it’s not a proper boat. Sorry to be a sailing boat snob, but the first boat I ever sailed into Glenarm was a 130 year old gaff ketch, which could have sailed through the jellyfish, and with a good wind might have dragged that net clear of the swarm…who knows?

I’m not a fan of salmon farming (it’s hard to find an impartial link), I think farmed salmon is usually dyed, weak, fatty stuff and having studied parasitology, I don’t like the endemic lice or the drugs used to treat them (Glenarm Salmon, I should say here, is organic). Compared to wild salmon, it’s tofu. But tonight, I feel for that bull-like skipper (a proper seaman, and a gentleman) and his mates and the people who have nurtured those fish. I’ve worked on (and for six torrid weeks) run a farm ashore and in that time I came to care passionately about the animals in my care.

Sod the hapless England football team, it’s the salmon farmers of Glenarm Bay and Cushenden I feel for tonight. And, if one can care for something so big, so inimical to emotion, I care about the sea. Crap. This is another pointer to the fact that something very bad is going on in our seas - in times past, pelagic predators would have eaten millions of those little Mauve Stingers before they hit puberty, far less got to sufficate a load of salmon. But we’ve trawled, battered and eaten those pelagic and benthic predators and the seas have heated up and…here we are.

This is marine ecological catastrophe on our civilised doorstep. We’re farming and eating salmon and ruining the sea because we want to, not because our lives depend on it. A lot of the world depends on fish for the protein in their diet, and those ecosystems are breaking down too. It ain’t good.