Fresh sustainable fish, courtesy of my dad

I love eating fish and I’m spoilt in this regard. My dad, Douglas, is a formidable sport fisherman and provides a regular and varied supply of hand-caught fish. Mackerel, bream, sea bass and bonito are all staples. Occasionally there’s conger, tuna, squid, octopus and others. You can’t get fish any fresher than this. Sometimes, it’s on the plate just a few hours after it was caught. That’s a rare thing and it means I’m accustomed to the highest quality. It also means that I rarely buy fish at the market, or at least of the sort my dad catches. If it isn’t that morning’s catch – sometimes it is but, let’s face it, often it isn’t – then I don’t want it. I realise that might sound snotty but hey, I confessed in the opening sentence, I'm spoilt when it comes to fish.

There’s another reason why I like eating fish caught by my dad, and that’s because it’s sustainable. Most of the fish we buy in the market here in Gibraltar or across the way in Spain was caught by Spanish trawlers [though you'd be surprised how much isn't]. The Spanish fleet is amongst the largest and most aggressive in the world, and often its strategies leave a lingering, unpleasant aftertaste.

Greenpeace pointed that out this week with a protest in La Coruña, in northwest Spain, ahead of a meeting on sustainable fishing. With stocks collapsing in Europe, Spain’s fleet is now plundering waters as far away as Antarctica and Africa using European taxpayers’ money, Greenpeace said in a new report. Spain’s largest fishing ships can haul in 3,000 tonnes of tuna per trip, double the annual catch of some Pacific nations. Despite a collapse of European fish stocks and decades of promises to reduce capacity, Spain’s industrial fishing has actually grown, fuelled by EU subsidies and "short-sighted" Spanish policies. The day before fisheries ministers gathered in one of Spain’s main fishing hubs to discuss EU fisheries policy reform, Greenpeace activists hung banners from La Coruna’s iconic Tower of Hercules reading “EU: Save Our Oceans.”

The first time I came face to face with the issue of sustainable fishing was a few years ago while writing about Japanese tuna trawlers for the local paper. Johnny, a local photographer, and I watched and photographed as dozens of frozen tuna, some quite small, were lifted from the holds of large trawlers suspected of transhipping shipments. The suspicion was that they were fishing in excess of what they were allowed and blurring the lines on their catch. Dodging quotas, in effect. We never managed to prove it, but after we ran that story the trawlers stopped coming and the government stepped up its monitoring.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of Greenpeace's criticism of the Spanish fleet, but there's no doubt in my mind that the ocean's are under threat. Watch The End of the Line if you need convincing. So on Sunday, when we met my family for lunch and my dad produced two large specimens of sea bass, I was overjoyed. Here was the freshest fish, cleanly gutted, filleted and ready to eat with a clean conscience. We ate one fish raw and the other cooked.

Stay tuned for the recipes in a day or two.