“Mackerel dried up a couple of years ago because there are so many tuna. It was costing £200 a day and in the old days I could have earnt £200k a year fishing but it’s totally different now. 'I was fishing rod and line and I would take all my fish direct to the market and every Friday I would get a cheque through the post. “Before lockdown everything went to Brixham market,” said the father-of-three who lives in Torquay. But over the years, it’s got tougher and tougher to be a fisherman. Other than a short spell as a firefighter, Keith has been fishing all his life. On his way home, he’d knock on doors to sell his fish and he’d generally have sold out by the time he made it back to his family.Īt 16, his dad sent him off to Falmouth School of Seamanship to learn his trade and he spent years working on beam trawlers, scallopers and crabbers. Keith Blackburn has been fishing since the age of 14 when he left school and would spend every day catching mackerel off Babbacombe Pier. But one fisherman says lockdown has been the making of him. It was a tough time for almost everyone involved. The price of fish went through the floor and for rod and line fishermen in Torbay at the time, it was no longer worth landing at Brixham market for a virtually non existent return. There were no restaurants, no pubs and no fishmongers to sell to - and there were no countries to export to either. When Covid shut down most of Europe in March 2020, the UK fishing industry virtually collapsed overnight.

The Auguste by Keith Blackburn