Hutchison: For hundreds of years Scottish fishermen have sailed past this pier out into the North Sea, first in search of the herring and then the cod, which enabled them to build an industry and give their communities a reason to exist.
Now scientists say the fish are disappearing, and these fishermen have been told to cut their catch by 50 percent and spend a lot more time ashore. For one of the most fishing dependent regions in Europe, it represents a disaster.
James Buchan is on his way back into Peterhead harbour with a mediocre catch. Since the quotas were announced and days at sea slashed, he says many skippers in the Scottish fleet are now facing bankruptcy.

Buchan: The pressure is on you whenever you leave port.
You’ve got a crew to pay, a six member crew. They all have families, they’ve all got mortgages.

Hutchison: They cling to the coast for dear life -- the hard flinty fishing communities of North East Scotland, now being whipped by bitter winds of change blowing off the North Sea. In the good old days, everything seemed so much simpler, according to retired fishermen like James Corno.

Corno: There was no quotas. You could go anywhere you want. You had no log books to fill up. You were your own master and you just went out to the fish and everybody had the same opportunities. Whatever you catch, you were allowed to land. And they were much happier days. I mean everybody was content.

Hutchison: The fishermen were content, because science hadn’t yet begun assessing just how much damage was being done to fish stocks in the North Sea. But when the data did begin to come in, it revealed the fishermen weren’t managing their resource at all, they were simply stripping it.

Cook: Cod in particular has decreased from something like 250,00 tonnes of spawning fish back in the 1970s down to about 40,000 tonnes at the moment. And because we’re removing 60 percent of the stock per year through fishing; clearly in the long term, that’s not sustainable.

Hutchison: Dr Robin Cook heads Scotland’s Fisheries Research Services -- or to put it less formally, he’s the man who speaks for the cod.

Cook: If the rate of fishing we’ve observed in the recent past continues, the cod stock will probably collapse within a decade – you know, it could be as quickly as three years, it could be five years.

Hutchison: And across the North Sea…in the cool glass towers of European decision making, the European Commission essentially agreed. Commission boss Franz Fischler announcing a 50 percent cut in the cod quota with similar measures for haddock and whiting. What’s more, Scotland’s fishermen would be allowed only 15 days at sea each month to catch them.

Fischler: We hope that with these measures that we will be back at the normal level of stocks within five to ten years.

Corno: The fishing community here are very, very angry at the way they’ve been treated. The Scottish fishermen have been discriminated against. They’ve cut our quotas, they’ve cut our fleet and they haven’t cut the foreign fleets of France and Denmark, to the same comparison as us.

Hutchison: Not true say the bureaucrats in Brussels.

Fischler: We shouldn’t forget that there are many other areas in the European Union, for example the German fishing sector, they reduced to less than half of their former size, the fleet during the last years. So we cannot say in Scotland there is a natural right that Scottish fishermen can continue their activities at the size what they had 20 years ago and all the rest of Europe should reduce their fleet.

Hutchison: All James Buchan sees is a burly Austrian destroying Scottish livelihoods.

Buchan: I ask him to come to the North East of Scotland. See the devastation he’s done in the last few years.
Come and meet the fishermen. Don’t always go by the scientists. Come and meet the people out there and doing the job. We live in hope, we hope it can get better, but we just seem to go from crisis to crisis, I must go, this fish is coming ashore.

Hutchison: It’s early morning at the Peterhead fish auctions -- the busiest white fish market in Europe.
James Scott has been a fish auctioneer for 22 years. He says they used to get 6,000 cases of fish through here every day -- now they’re lucky to get half of that.

Scott: People are living in a depression mode almost, because of all the uncertainty regarding the industry. When I first started 20 odd years ago, things were buoyant. There was a good atmosphere in the industry. Plenty fish, plenty boats going to sea, nobody ever thought there would be redundancies. I remember one of my old bosses saying that you’ve got a job for life.

Hutchison: In the 1890’s Fraserburgh had a fishing fleet of more than 800 boats -- its harbour a veritable forest of masts. Fishing brought prosperity and jobs; these women were known as the gutty girls, cleaning herring by the docks in preparation for export. Scottish quality sent around the world. And Fraserburgh still has its gutty girls -- working in processing plants, filetting cod and haddock. Of the town’s 12 thousand people it’s estimated that half of all jobs are directly reliant on a living from the sea, and now many of those jobs are at risk.

Scott: Every industry, from the butcher the backer the candlestick maker. It affects everyone.

Hutchison: The Scottish Fisheries Minister has tried to soften the blow -- 150 million dollars on offer to those who’ll decommission their boats and get out of the industry. But most of that money will go to banks to pay off the huge loans which helped skippers buy their boats in the first place and their crews won’t see any of it. That’s the future facing Malcolm MacDonald. He spends most of his life living and working aboard the Crystal River, fishing hundreds of miles off the coast in ten day cycles.

Malcolm : Right this is where we call the cabin, six beds here, that’s my bed and the rest of the crews beds and they’re nay much bigger than coffins.

Hutchison: The work is hard, he sleeps when he can -- all the while, bouncing around he says, like a bloody cork in a pond.

Malcolm : This is where four of the crew stand, including me and we gut fish into the bin and we gut fish into the washer.

Carol: I do not enjoy seeing my husband going away back to sea after being away for ten days, back for two days,
knowing he’s going back for a further ten. What for? A pittance. For endangering his life and coming home with a mere £500 for a fortnight’s solid graft. It’s just not worth it.

Hutchison: Carol Macdonald is not just a wife and mother, she is a Cod Crusader, one of the few people here who refuse to accept that all is lost. On a chill Wednesday evening, Carol and the Cod Crusaders have organised a pub meeting with other local women, to try to give their campaign new momentum.

Carol: Our men simply can’t get a price for their quality fish that they’re tucking in So the men are now going to give donations of fish, filleted, and we’ll bag them and label them, and we’re going down to Edinburgh in order just to give these fish away, to highlight that they cannot get a price for them, so they’re just as well giving them away.

Hutchison: The women of this community have never baulked at a challenge. A hundred years ago, they used to carry their men out to their boats, so they wouldn’t have to get their leather boots wet. Carol’s husband Malcolm is somewhat ashamed that they are carrying their men again.

Malcolm: Three women have taken over a male dominated industry. Three women is fighting for it, for a male dominated industry. That’s what bloody peeves me off the most -- and your skippers cannot do nothing. They won’t stand up. You mention a blockade and they say oh, we cannot do that, that’s breaking the law – bugger the law, do something about it.

Hutchison: But do what? The European Commission says the Scottish fleet must endure these quotas, so stocks can recover. But what guarantee is there the stock will improve? A similar crisis hit the fishery of Newfoundland a decade ago and the cod never came back.

Fischler: Maybe the mistake of the past was before I became
responsible for the fishing sector, that nobody took care about the stock development and now it is rather late, but we hope it is not too late.

Hutchison: Another night, another symbolic gesture -- the lighting of distress flares in Peterhead harbour. Tonight the Scottish boats out at sea have turned off their satellite systems, to signal the disappearance of their industry.

Buchan: My kids is 17 and 14. I honestly hope none of them marry a fisherman. Once upon a time I would probably have loved it if it had been a fisherman – I wouldn’t like to see my children have a husband with the pressures their father has.

Cook: I think it would be arrogant to claim that I understand their situation, but I have a lot of sympathy for them. Clearly they’re placed in an extremely difficult position and understandably they don’t like the science, because it’s having a very detrimental affect on them as they see it.

Hutchison: It’s a matter of opinion, who is most under threat, the fish or the fishermen. But the people here are used to enduring. They remain grimly determined to ride this storm out.