Case 88055 — Fal and Helford

The case in brief

Assessed and closed: vessel and rule cannot be established on any evidence available to us.

Case

#88055

Observation

Apparent fishing (satellite vessel tracking)

Closed area

Fal and Helford (Closed Areas)

What is prohibited there

bottom-towed gear prohibited

When

2026-10-17 10:47 UTC → 2026-10-17 14:36 UTC

Position

50.1539°, -5.0232°

Vessel

THE TROUT

MMSI

232031573

Flag

GBR

Gear (satellite-inferred)

Trawlers

How this case was judged

Every CAUGHT case is assessed on three independent questions, and the weakest of the three decides. A case reads CAUGHT only when all three are established and a person has reviewed it.

• Activity strong

  Was it fishing, here, and then?

  • 3 separate fishing bouts inside the closure — a vessel on passage makes one.

• Vessel unknown

  What gear does this boat actually use?

  • This vessel's gear cannot be established by any route available to us.
  • THE TROUT — BASIS A (`absent_from_register`). Researched 2026-10-22 (review cycle 106), the only subject on the live gear worklist: 1 case blocked, #88055, Fal and Helford (Closed Areas), 17 Oct 2026, graded activity strong / rule strong / vessel unknown. REGISTER NEGATIVE: scripts/mmo-history-index.js --name "THE TROUT" and --name "TROUT" both return NEVER across all 39 published UK fishing vessel lists, January 2015 to September 2026 (96,723 rows, 6,349 distinct names); a substring pass over every distinct name for TROUT / TRUIT finds 0 rows, so no near-spelling or dropped-prefix variant hides it (the cycle-45 limit). scripts/gfw-registry-identify.js against the October 2026 over- and under-10m lists: no establishable registration. scripts/eu-fleet-register.js --identifier "THE TROUT" and "TROUT": 0 rows. GFW IDENTITY (public-global-vessel-identity:v4.0, ssvid 232031573, fetched 2026-10-22): ONE selfReportedInfo record, shipname THE TROUT, callsign MIJK6, imo null, 113,827 messages, 2025-07-16 to 2026-10-17. registryInfo EMPTY, so there is no register-side alias to test. combinedSourcesInfo gear TRAWLERS / shiptype FISHING, source COMBINATION_OF_REGISTRY_AND_AIS_INFERRED_NN_INFO: an inferred label, and with no registry record behind it, purely behavioural. Never sufficient on its own. WHAT THE BOAT IS, SO FAR AS AN MMSI-KEYED SOURCE SAYS: VesselFinder /vessels/details/232031573, fetched 2026-10-22: AIS type "Pleasure craft", Length / Beam 6 / 2 m, callsign MIJK6, which matches GFW selfReportedInfo on the same ssvid, so it is the same transmitter as our case data (the OBERON standard). THIS IS ONE SOURCE, NOT THE TWO THAT cycle 48 REQUIRED for data/known-non-fishing.json: MyShipTracking (/vessels/mmsi-232031573 and /vessels?name=) and MarineTraffic both returned HTTP 403, and vesseltracker 404. And an AIS ship type is self-declared. So the vessel is NOT recorded as non-fishing, and the case is NOT exonerated. WHY THIS MATTERS AND IS STATED HERE: a 6 m open boat dwelling in Carrick Roads at an implied 0.78 kn in mid-October is ALSO what a Fal haul-tow oyster punt looks like (the oyster season opens 1 October, and haul-tow is a dredge worked from an anchored punt). If it is one, it would be fishing under the Fal Fishery Order licence regime, not on the MMO list under this name, and whether the Closed Areas byelaw reaches it is a separate rule question this cycle did not settle. We close this case because nothing obtainable states this hull's gear or licence, NOT because we believe nothing happened. WHAT WOULD REOPEN IT: THE TROUT or callsign MIJK6 appearing on a future MMO list; a second MMSI-keyed registry confirming pleasure craft (which would move it to known-non-fishing.json and the case to not_a_breach); or any source stating gear or a Fal Fishery Order licence against MMSI 232031573. Effect of this entry: #88055 review -> not_established; #80269 (25 Sep, already not_established on activity) unchanged. Nothing promoted, nothing exonerated.
  • What would reopen it: the vessel appearing on a future MMO list, an Isle of Man or Channel Islands register becoming available, or any source stating the gear against this MMSI.

• Rule unknown

  What was prohibited there, then, for that gear?

  • Rule reviewed and NOT resolved: The Closed Areas (European Marine Sites) No. 2 byelaw bans bottom towed gear here, but paragraph 4(b) disapplies the ban for any vessel using bottom towed gear under an exemption issued by Cornwall IFCA, which paragraph 5 allows the Authority to grant to a named vessel for a specified gear type. Cornwall IFCA publishes no list of exemptions issued, so it cannot be shown that a given vessel did not hold one. A breach is therefore not established from vessel tracking and gear alone.

Not established: vessel; rule. A case is only as strong as its weakest factor, so this one cannot read CAUGHT until that is settled.

Check it yourself

Nothing here asks to be taken on trust. The full report sets out every source, every measurement and everything we could not establish.

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