Last voyage for decommissioned fishing vessels

Two Irish vessels head to Denmark to be broken up

Two Aran Islands fishing vessels which were approved for Ireland’s decommissioning scheme made their final trip earlier this month.

The Connacht Ranger and Conquest in the Caledonian Canal en route to Denmark for scrapping. (Photo: John Conneely)

The 17m Connacht Ranger and the 20m Conquest were photographed on their voyage from Ireland to Denmark. Skipper-owner John Conneely, from the Aran Island of Inis Mór, opted to take the vessels to Denmark for scrapping.

“Beautiful but poignant images of MFV Connacht Ranger and Conquest waiting to go up Neptune’s Staircase on the Caledonian Canal en route to Denmark for decommissioning. A stairway to heaven of sorts for two boats whose time is sadly up,” read a post on Twitter by John Conneely’s partner Mary-Frances Beatty.

Both vessels arrived in Denmark on 11 June after a seven- day voyage. “The trip through Scotland added a nice silver lining to an otherwise difficult journey,” said Mary-Frances Beatty.

Decommissioning of the Dutch fleet is also continuing, with the final vessels that have accepted their offers making the ‘funeral trip’, as the operators of the beamer Drakkar UK 136 put it, to the breaker’s yard in Harlingen. The latest round of scrapping, they say, will see 100t a week of fish lost to the Dutch market. “What will we eat later instead of super- healthy fresh fish from the North Sea? Dubious tilapia from Asia, tasteless seaweed croquette, flour worms?” EMK Vissers said in its Facebook post after documenting the final landing of the vessel, which was built in 1998.

Formalities were completed on 12 June, and the automatic identification systems for both vessels were turned off the following day. “John said goodbye with a heavy heart to the Connacht Ranger in particular. He just kept her wheel and anchor,” said Mary-Frances Beatty.

“The industry is just too hard to survive in nowadays,” she added. She has worked in the state and private sector, and says she has ‘never encountered anything like the complexity of running a fishing business’.

The 17m Connacht Ranger has been in the Conneely family for

over half a century. It was one of a fleet of timber vessels built at boatyards then run by Ireland’s sea fisheries board Bord Iascaigh Mhara.

John Conneely, who is a fourth-generation skipper, took up fishing with his father Gregory and sister Clíona at the age of 16.

The late Gregory Conneely was something of a legend. He survived a serious deck injury at an early stage in his career. Then, in 1968, he was at home on Inis Mór with his wife Maggie – who was about to deliver their first child – when he had a premonition that something was wrong. His first vessel, the Ard Aengus, had run up on rocks.

The Aran Islands-owned Connacht Ranger and Conquest making their last trip across the North Sea. (Photo: John Conneely)

Gregory Conneely launched his brother’s boat, the Ard Colum, with several young fit men from the island. In a terrific feat of seamanship, they saved the crew from the Ard Aengus before the vessel broke up in heavy seas.

John Conneely became a skipper in 1998 at the age of 21. He loved his career at sea, but after the family’s vessel Maggie C was detained in 2006, his father advised him to ‘get out’, in view of how difficult it was to operate within the CFP.

The case took almost 10 years to be heard, but in May 2015, John Conneely was acquitted of breaching EU fishing regulations.

He continued in fishing, but the loss of access to British waters after it withdrew from the EU was a final hammer blow. He and Mary-Frances Beatty decided to apply for the Irish government decommissioning scheme, feeling they had no choice with so little quota available to them.

“I would not like my young son Gregory to go into this industry, as I don’t see a viable future,” John Conneely said.

This story was taken from the latest issue of Fishing News. For more up-to-date and in-depth reports on the UK and Irish commercial fishing sector, subscribe to Fishing News here or buy the latest single issue for just £3.30 here.

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