Stop playing God with sea’s bounty

THE inner section of Dun Aengus Dock, in Galway city centre, was often as packed as a giant sardine tin with sprat and mackerel during the last two weeks of October.

Sprat, driven down the channel that forms the leg of the ‘T’ connecting the inner, wet dock with Galway Bay, found their escape route blocked by the predatory mackerel behind them. Reaching the head of the ‘T’, they veered left and then left again into a side channel that leads back towards the sea but is, in fact, an enclosed dock shaped like a sardine tin. Filled with fish, it provided a feast for birds, seals and human kind. It was, of course, we humans that took the major bounty. Ingeniously, we mechanised the harvesting of the bonanza.

At times, sprat driven from the water by the voracious mackerel silvered the dock-side steps and jetties with their scales. A few seals lolled in the midst of the sprat soup, while others swam in the ‘T’ of the dock and outside the gates, closed at low tide to maintain water levels within. The ‘sardine tin’ of trapped fish was overlooked by roads, apartment blocks, businesses and private homes, allowing a unique marine phenomenon to be viewed in the very centre of Galway city.