Andy Butler on Fishing

And we didn’t mess around much with fish. We used to do a bit of netting but again that was time consuming. You didn’t really want to waste time on anything else other than doing your pots. That’s where your money came from, so that’s what we did.

Lisa: What sort of fish did you net in those times that you did a little bit of that?

Bass, sole and sea trout. We used to like fishing for sea trout. We used to get them in June and July, in close. If you put a freshwater net across somewhere where a fresh water outlet went out, there were chances that you’d get a sea trout.

The only trouble was we liked then ourselves, so as a commercial enterprise it was a waste of time because we used to keep them ourselves. And I did at one time have a big commercial smoker and we used to do smoked fish but again it was taking time away from potting and we used to smoke the sea trout to make smoked trout and that was much too nice to sell so we used to freeze it up and keep it and eat it ourselves.

It’s nice. Sea trout, we had some quite big ones, you know. I think the biggest one we had was about eight pounds, something like that?