Golden Miles

Between the 1980s and 2010, almost all US maritime states moved all fishing nets more than 3 miles away from the coast. Most often, this spectacular evolution took place following multiple legal battles whose unwitting heroes were marine organisms and especially emblematic species, such as cetaceans, birds and sea turtles. The story that played out in this regard in Florida is extraordinary. The situation then improved markedly everywhere and there is no question of going back.
The book titled « Golden miles » starts from this totally unknown American history to explain that it is urgent to imitate this common sense initiative to breathe new life into our European coastlines which are undergoing accelerated desertification. At the beginning of August 1990, an important event occurred in the author's life. In a net a few meters from the beach there was a salmon. The scene takes place more than 20 km from the Adour estuary. What was the path of the salmon returning from the distant northern waters where it grew? Why was this one so close to the beach but so far from the Adour estuary? Was the Adour only his native river? The author would only find the answers to these questions almost thirty years later.

This capture of salmon at the coast, which we later learned was very commonplace for coastal fishermen, revealed a scientific reality slowly updated between the 1980s and approximately 2015. At the same time, the phenomenon of "desertification" of the Landes coasts, detected by amateur fishing and started at the end of the 90s, took on a dramatic appearance from 2016, a season from which the abundance and size of fish fell suddenly. Monitoring current events in European maritime fishing on the one hand and scientific publications on the other allows the author to understand part of the explanations for this coastal decline.

It was therefore at the end of the 2010s that, thanks to this salmon caught in a net a generation earlier, the author finally made the so obvious link between the coastal marine strip and our rivers. This coastal marine strip is the logical migratory corridor for anadromous fish which come to reproduce in rivers. But it is much more than that: it is also and above all the nursery of around twenty commercial species of marine fish of prime importance. The author shows how we have been fishing for centuries in sea nurseries with gear that is incapable of sparing young fish that cannot yet reproduce. We have been fishing for decades near the coast with gear that is specifically capable of intercepting salmon that circulate just below the surface in search of their native waters to reproduce. At the same time, the common fisheries policy does not spare juvenile fish at all and only cares about maintaining the tonnes of fish landed, without worrying about the economic results of an activity which is placed in every way on permanent perfusion for decades.

By alternating biological, naturalistic, scientific, regulatory or legal references, the author makes us discover that we are very far from the goal to avoid the disappearance of coastal fishing towards which we are rapidly heading. This book justifies a strong measure, simple to understand and enforce, validated abroad for ages, so that marine life and local coastal fishing can be revived: relieving coastal nurseries and freeing the migratory corridor of anadromous fish by moving all fishing nets beyond 3 nautical miles.