Mackerel Fishing in Devon
We had a wonderful day out in Lyme Regis, where my friend the press photographer Richard Austin lives - and here’s the article I wrote about a day out mackerel fishing with him…
High-days and holidays used to include an element of food gathering, especially at the seaside - but very few people today go shrimping, winkling or cockling for a family cook-up on the beach. However, one traditional seaside foodie activity that is alive and kicking is the hour-long mackerel fishing trip.
The queues on the famous Cobb at Lyme Regis this week were impressive to behold as the dozen or so mackerel boats came and went from the quay. Harry May, the skipper who took the WMN out in his bright red boat, was constantly fielding calls on his mobile phone from hopeful fisherfolk who were booking days ahead.
Skipper Harry May offers a mackerel to the gulls
And, as Harry and other skippers disgorged their freight of happy customers - clutching strings of sparkling and sometimes still-flapping mackerel - so the looks of envy and excitement on the faces of expectant fisherfolk awaiting their turn were a joy to see.
Not surprisingly… Because nothing - absolutely nothing - in the sea tastes quite as good as a mackerel that is cooked within an hour or two of being caught. A day old mackerel is a thing of sadness when compared to one that is fresh from the waves - which is why I took my rapid-reaction Lotus Grill, so that photographer Richard Austin and I could enjoy ours on Monmouth Beach just minutes after we’d come ashore.
An act of huge optimism on my part, admittedly - because members of the Hesp family have long held a reputation for being the worst (or the unluckiest) fishermen in the world. I am, however, happy to report that not even our jinx could prevent me from hooking a fine brace of the beautiful fish which have been appearing in numbers in Lyme Bay for the past week or two.
Before that, there was a worrying no-show on the part of the mackerel which, some say, are being sucked out of the ocean in such vast and unsustainable numbers by massive Scottish trawlers, their annual shoals are in terminal decline. Others blame global warming and say the mackerel have gone north in search of cooler waters and are now being caught way up off the coast of Iceland.
If the mackerel are disappearing it will be to the huge disappointment of the many holidaymakers who love to catch them in places like Lyme Regis. Like the Brighton visitor Stephanie Copper who joined us, with her family, on Harry May’s boat…
Stephanie had to be helped aboard as she was walking with the aid of crutches, and she told me: “I’ve got a bad back now, but nothing will stop me getting here. We’ve been coming for 20 years - I was even on the boat the day I was due with my youngest.
“We were hoping it (the movement of the boat) would start off my labour, but he was born five days late. Even so, his middle name is Bay, after Lyme Bay - and if he had been born here he would have been called Albert Harry Bay Copper, after Harry May.
“Our 17-year-old son, Toby, first went on the boat when he was a few months old in his buggy.”
As for the mackerel fishing trips offered in her own home-seaside-town, she said: “It’s not the same. They have very big boats - 60 people - and they only do long journeys. We don’t go on them. But the first thing we do when we arrive in Lyme Regis is try to work out when we can go mackerel fishing. That’s our priority. I absolutely love it.”
It was the same with all the hopefuls waiting on the quay and the successful fisherfolk stepping ashore with their shining prizes: the annual mackerel fishing trip was a must-do part of the family holiday - although I’m guessing not many of them had named their babies after the experience.
As we cruised out to the mackerel grounds about a mile offshore aboard the locally built 24-foot-long Marie F, Harry May told me: “I’ve been doing this job for 45 years, coming out of Lyme Regis harbour. It is most definitely a British tradition. Many people think that - so we don’t want the mackerel going down hill.
“And for the past few years they have been going down hill a bit,” he shrugged. “I think we’ve got global warming and the whitebait and mackerel are in large numbers off Iceland, so they might be moving north.
“But we’ve got some really good sized ones at the moment. The last week or so has been really good, at exactly the right time when there’s loads of people here. Which is really good because people want to barbecue their mackerel.
“Barbecuing mackerel is definitely why they want to come out,” Harry went on. “The fresher you cook a mackerel, the better it is. A lot of people cook them straight away - I even have someone in the fish and chip on the quay who will cook them for you.
“If you’re in a B&B or hotel, or you don’t fancy taking the fish home in your car, I’ve got a man who will fillet them for you and they are whisked off and within ten minutes people are eating their fish with his chips. Six quid the lot!
“But people barbecue them on the beach - and the nice thing is that on Lyme Regis beach you can barbecue your fish. Over at Portland and Weymouth you’re not allowed to - I fancy over the years people have left a right mess there. But here it’s OK. So you can go to the Harbour Inn, buy your drinks, sit on the beach with your beer and barbecue your mackerel.”
Not only did we forgo the beer (I had to drive home to Exmoor), but we also turned our backs on the main beach at Lyme because there was not a single empty square foot to be found on its sands in the heatwave earlier this week. Instead, Richard and I turned left at the top of The Cobb and were instantly on pebbly Monmouth Beach (named after he of the failed Rebellion, who landed there).
Harry had given us two extra mackerel to go with the pair I’d caught (we also had to feed my wife and her friend), so I gutted the whole lot standing knee deep in the sea and they were on the Lotus Grill, literally within ten minutes of us landing.
The Lotus (available from the Somerset company Hot Smoked - https://hotsmoked.co.uk) is the ideal portable beach barbecue, by the way, because not only is it lightweight, but it’s got a little electric motor which fans the tiny crucible that contains the charcoal. This means it can be hot enough for cooking fish in a couple of minutes.
And that, in my opinion, is the very best way to cook and eat a fresh mackerel - cooked over hot coals on a beach, with nothing but a lemon and a sprinkle of pepper and salt for company.
The trips still aren’t up and running as I post this article on 15/07/2020 but might well be later as the lockdown restrictions continue to ease - visit http://www.mackerelfishinglymeregis.com/ or phone 07974 753287.
