The health benefits of omega fish oils are well documented, and many cancer patients benefit from healthy interests such as fly fishing – see casting for recovery.
In recognition of the desperate need to save threatened stocks of wild salmon and to prevent them from being entirely wiped out due to coastal netting, neighboring ‘salmon countries’ for the past twenty years have agreed to a moratorium on the netting and long-lining of wild salmon in order to allow more salmon to return to their natural spawning grounds. However, Scotland is the only EU member state that operates a policy of mixed-stock wild salmon fisheries along its coastline. Over the last two decades most of the salmon killed by Scottish netsmen are fish that have been spared by other states.
In a letter to Richard Lockhead in the Scottish Parliament, Norway’s Orri Vigfússon says: “You should remember that the biomass of the Scottish salmon is created in the feeding grounds off the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, where thankfully, Scotland and the EU have no jurisdiction. I would remind you that if you insist on continuing your current strategy the inevitable outcome will be disastrous whether the stocks begin to improve or deteriorate. If by some miracle your stocks begin to recover and the Scottish netting continued the commercial fishermen of these other countries would be entitled to take these extra salmon at sea as fair quotas. So the bulk of the extra fish would never return to the native rivers of Scotland and Norway”. (see below)
In a separate letter to Scotland’s Fist Minister Alex Salmond, The Faroe Islands Vessel Owners Association have expressed their extreme disappointment that the restraint adopted by other countries has been completely undermined by Scotland.
The letter explains how the Faroese fisherman have been eager to help rebuild wild salmon stocks, agreed that they would not harvest any of the wild salmon that fed in their waters. “It was not an easy decision. The Faroe Islands have few natural resources other than the sea and our fishermen made great sacrifices”.