Jeremy Grieve — August 2026
A bluefin tuna ripped my trousers last week.
To be fair to the tuna, it was already dead at the time. I was helping lift it up and into its box on the quayside at Newlyn when a tooth caught my trousers — and honestly, the rip felt more like a souvenir than anything else. But let me rewind and explain how I ended up on a Cornish quay hauling tuna in the first place.
I'd driven down to Newlyn, right at the tippy tip of south-west Cornwall, a handful of miles from Land's End, to show one of our customers, Borough Broth, more about the Cornish fishing industry and where their fish comes from. We primarily supply them with hake frames and bones for their broths, and they're making a short film about the trip — the fish market, the fishermen, and a hake dish cooked right there in Newlyn — to capture what's really going on in the Cornish fishing industry.
There was a slight snag: nearly all the hake netters were out at sea, exactly as the tides dictated, so there was only a tiny bit of hake on the market to show for it. That's fishing — the sea doesn't run to anyone's filming schedule. But what Newlyn served up instead turned out to be far more remarkable.
Early doors on the market
Paul Trebilcock took us around the fish market early on Thursday morning, with the sun coming up around six. It wasn't a huge market that day — fairly chilled, in both senses. Quiet, but with that steady hustle and bustle of a working port, and properly cold as we walked in. They've actually been having a tough time keeping the market cold enough in this warm spell, and were staying on top of it with measures like opening up the fans.
Paul talked us through how the market works, the different species crossing the floor, the challenges, and the developments they've made over many years. It was quite funny showing the Borough Broth team the back end of the auction. I think they'd pictured a proper fish auction — lots of guys standing around shouting over crates of fish. The reality these days is people at computers setting prices, with all the buyers bidding remotely. I'm not saying it was underwhelming — it was genuinely fascinating — but I suspect it was slightly contrary to what they were expecting!
The changing sea
For me personally, the most interesting conversation was about the change in species showing up in Cornish waters, and what the scientists think it means. With water temperatures rising, more Mediterranean species are arriving — octopus, bluefin tuna, bonito, red mullet — which simply wasn't the case fifteen or twenty years ago. Meanwhile, species like cod, whiting and haddock are moving further north. For years the assumption was that this was down to overfishing, but the more recent science points at climate change.
Nothing shows this better than the octopus boom. Last year, landings of common octopus were nearly 65 times the recent annual average — the biggest bloom in at least 75 years, and only the fourth of its kind in 125 years of records. Octopus worth somewhere between £6.7 and £9.4 million was landed on the south coast in the first eight months of 2025 alone, and one Newlyn trawler famously brought home over 20 tonnes from three days at sea.
There was a bit of octopus on the market that morning — maybe a tonne or so — which is little compared to what's been going on, but the boom has brought real commercial value to the industry this year. There are two camps in the port: those who are nervous, because the octopus are eating the crabs and lobsters, and those trying to see it as an opportunity and working to develop the octopus fishery. Both, frankly, have a point.
It was also fun to see some oddities, like green sea urchins on the market — something I'd never seen before in all my years of visiting Newlyn, Brixham and Plymouth. You genuinely never know what's going to come in.
Andrew and the bluefin
The next fantastic experience was introducing the team to Andrew Pascoe, a prominent Newlyn fisherman whose family has been fishing there for generations. Andrew has fished many different species on many different types of boat, and at the moment he's on a smaller vessel, hook-and-line fishing on his own — and he was out after bluefin tuna while we were down there.
In a way, Andrew is the story of the changing sea. Generations of his family have fished these waters, and he now makes part of his living hunting a fish his grandfather would scarcely have seen off Cornwall. Bluefin coming back to the south-west, and to the UK more widely, is one of the most exciting stories in fishing — for fishermen, buyers, processors, chefs, retail customers, you name it — and we talked a lot about how to develop that industry.
The way they fish for them is brilliant: by sight. All you need is a pair of binoculars. As Andrew put it: "You can look two and a half miles to the left, and two and a half miles to the right." So two boats working together can span ten miles of sea, watching for tuna boiling up on the surface in massive schools — Andrew and one of the young lads from the young fishermen's association showed me videos, and it's an amazing sight. Once you've found them, you troll spreader bars rigged with big coloured squid lures to attract the fish.
Andrew had hoped they'd be in close that day, maybe a couple of miles off, but the fish had moved — his second one came from about twenty-nine miles out. He landed two: one in the mid-forties on the kilos, the other mid-seventies. And his timing was spot on — there was no tuna on either of the south-west markets, Newlyn or Brixham, so bringing a couple in on a Friday ahead of the weekend will have earned him some good prices. Well done to him.
As we took the tuna through, Andrew told us about the fish and showed us some of its aerodynamics — a machine built for speed. And then, as I lent a hand lifting the fish into their box, came my trouser incident and my souvenir.
Science on the quayside
That afternoon we also met the lead scientist working on the market — Lisa, I think, and apologies if I've got that wrong. She's surveying the octopus boom, and she also brought out bluefin tuna stomachs in ziplock bags for us to have a look at. They were actually not as big as you'd think. The diet studies are trying to work out what the tuna are eating, to understand what's keeping them in Cornish waters — the science of the changing sea happening right there among the fish boxes.
In a lovely small-world twist, it turned out she's a massive fan and customer of Borough Broth, so she thoroughly enjoyed meeting the team as much as they enjoyed meeting her.
The next generation
What struck me most about Andrew, though, was his optimism. He's closely involved in the young fishermen's organisation — getting younger people who are interested in commercial fishing to come and help out, and taking them out on the boats so they can understand how it all works and find their way into the industry. He said it's been a challenging time and things have felt a bit doom and gloom, but it was genuinely positive to hear how upbeat he is about where the fishery is going and the opportunities ahead. From a man with generations of Newlyn fishing behind him, that means something.
Finishing up
The Borough Broth team have also been working with Mackerel Sky, a really cool restaurant in Newlyn that seemed to have queues out the door every time I walked past. They were doing a fish broth with hake, and it looked like a fantastic dish. So while the tides meant we never saw the hake boats land, the team still got their hake in the end — cooked yards from where it comes ashore, in the very broth their business is built on. Full circle, one way or another.
I stayed just around the corner in Mousehole, which was a great spot, with the sun rising early doors over the harbour. And on the final night we sat having pizza on the beach, watching the sardine ring netters out in the bay working the sardines — plus a couple of opportunistic fishermen on the shore who, as far as we could see, didn't catch a thing. A good way to top off the trip as the sun went down.
All in all, a great trip — hearing about the changes in the fishery, sustainable fishing practices, and what it's like at the coalface. Great trip, great customers, and a great team down in Newlyn.
And a pair of trousers I won't be mending.
