9/12/22 Secret Sea Garden Blog (That’s right, a blog inside a blog, includes further ranting.)

The “official” site would cost more than £20,000, without the support of SMART Wales and MEECE the project simply would not happen. For a small business running a struggling pub it is ludicrous to even consider it.

But I had another idea, “Shellfish lines”, according to Natural Resources Wales if you grow shellfish on single lines you do not need a license and if seaweed just happens to grow on it then so be it.

This gave me an idea for the “unofficial” project, “The Secret Sea Garden” in the waters outside my pub. I knew just the man to help me, my lobster man.

With natural rope delivered to Danny’s I was spurred on to find anchors, I had images of “natural” anchors of hessian sacks filled with baby oysters, or cages of mussels in reclaimed lobster pots to help fast track ocean recovery. But the cost of baby oysters/ mussels and the practicality of keeping them alive while we wait for a launch date meant this was far from an easy solution.

Especially at this time as the pub is losing money, bookings have dropped, no shows have increased which has meant spare cash for the secret sea garden was not available. This meant it was time to use my savings to help keep this project going.

So fanciful ideas of “life anchors” were out, just “normal anchors” back in. The problem was that Danny uses saddle anchors, basically bits of railway, 20 – 30kg a piece. Easy, but the supplier has been out of stock for 12 months. There were posher anchors available but these where £50 plus. So I phoned my old schoolmate Ryan, boat yard extraordinaire. He had a chain which some lobster men use for anchors, so thought this would be easy? Can I have 30 chain anchors please Ryan?

Not so, his van was in the garage, so he was working from home. I needed to cut the chain myself into 30kg blocks. Not so easy in the depths of winter, as while the pub was quiet I was deep in Barti Rum packing mode, Christmas orders were piling in but covid and all kinds of lurgy were raging so staff absence was up. Postal strikes meant our delivery window’s were limited to 2 or 3 days so I was tied to the Barti warehouse helping Fran (Barti MD) and crew to get the orders despatched. 

Thankfully Adam my kitchen porter was willing and able to cut the chains. I won’t bore you with the absolute mountain of logistics issues that lead to me doing two trips with my old wooden trailer to get the anchors to where they needed to be. While standing in the pouring rain, wading through mud, unloading a tonne of sliced chain I did have a moment of thinking what the f**k am I doing?

But I was so close after 3 years of working on this, every tiny little step was a step closer. I left a little broken but eager to push. I called Danny (lobster man), “Danny, when can we get these lines out”? He was Christmas shopping in Bath, try next week, ok cool.

21/12/22 Secret Sea Garden Blog

Danny is busy, young family, Lobster & Mor shop, 2 fishing boats and a gin business. I’m busy, young family, pub, online seaweed business, and a rum business. We really do not have time to do this, the idea is ludicrous, it doesn’t make any financial sense and this close to Christmas me and Danny actually have a million other things we really should be doing. But we managed to confirm a day in the chaos of our lives.

December 21st 8am! Me, Danny and Joe (volunteer intern) rocked up at Danny’s yard and started rigging up our seaweed lines.

With light showers we set to work, Danny on knots, I can’t do knots, Joe on blowing up the fishing buoys and marking them, and me cutting up rope and basically moving chain back and forth. It was the first time I had seen the natural rope. I had ordered Sisal, Manilla, Jute and Hemp. This is the same rope we are using on the “official” project. None of it was marked so it was a quick call to the supplier and double check which was which. Pretty fundamental as the whole point of the secret sea garden was to see which “natural rope” produced the most life. Once sorted, we allocated buoys, set the anchors in fishing trays and rigged up and I double checked costs. 

Again, it does not make sense and that is why no one has done this before. Normal fishing nylon rope is £35 for a 220m coil, my “hippy” natural rope is the following:

• 12mm Jute £80 (220m coil)
• 8mm Hemp £120 (220m coil)
• 12mm Sisal £165 (220m coil)
• 12mm Manilla £207 (220m coil)

So, my rope is at least double in cost compared to current standard rope and by all accounts much more inferior in terms of longevity in the water. On the flip side it is not made from plastic so will not release millions of tiny nano plastics into the sea. It makes no business sense but in terms of saving the world it’s a no brainer.

And that is part of the problem. Their views demonstrate what I mean by the sea being a complete mess. The bureaucracy to do anything new, to improve the way things are is immense, but somehow the archaic rights of old school industries go pretty much unregulated. Current policies provide a landscape where lobster wars are happening every day. Half of the fishing equipment you find on the beach is not from storms but from lobster crews cutting up other fishing crew kits in their ongoing battle of sea “turf” wars.

The system needs to change to bring it up to date so we all can benefit, not least the sea itself.

Our seas have been decimated for centuries and everyone is used to that, there are no “no-take” zones in Welsh waters. It doesn’t sound like a problem until you imagine the whole country without a National Park?

That is the current situation in our seas, and it is very wrong. It is the 21^st century, the sea is  one of Wales’ most important assets but it has been forgotten. If this was happening on land there would be a national outcry.

And that is why we plan to change this, planting trees is so last year…