Outside In | Let’s reconcile to a diet of squid as we overfish to our own peril

For the past decade, my clan village neighbours in Clear Water Bay have had panic attacks every weekend as I swim out across the bay for some leisurely exercise out in the open sea.

They have for 10 years warned me that I will surely be attacked and eaten by a shark. They remind me of an old-timer attacked and killed at the edge of the bay a couple of decades ago.

I ignore them and their warnings, not because of any eccentric and ill-placed bravery on my part. Rather, the sea in Shelter Bay has been so ruthlessly fished to death over the decades that underwater surveys show a huge marine desert. Why should any rational shark nowadays stray anywhere near the waters around my bay when there is so little sea life on offer? I will start to worry if and when the sea life returns.

Meanwhile, I am reminded every evening and every weekend of the routine mindless pillaging that still continues in and near the bay, despite the systematic destruction that clan villagers and small-scale fisherfolk have inflicted over the years.

Every evening, four or five clan villagers wade waist-deep out across the bay with brilliant torches and floating polystyrene boxes to seduce what little sealife that remains.

They return to shore with desultory catches and complain to me about how rich the catches used to be when they waded out into the bay with their grandfathers. I have tried many times to ask them why catches might have declined so. Not one of them seems willing or able to see any link with their indiscriminate nightly pillage and the disappearance of fish.