Ghosteering
Coasteering with a habit: lost fishing gear comes out of the sea with us. We might have invented a sport - we definitely tidy as we go.
What is ghost gear?
Lost and abandoned fishing gear – nets, pots, line, rope – doesn’t stop working when it’s lost. It keeps on fishing, for years, catching seals, birds, crabs and fish that nobody will ever land. It’s among the most harmful marine litter there is, and the South Pembrokeshire coast collects more than its share.
We spend more time in the caves, gullies and tidelines of this coast than almost anyone, so we see where it ends up. We’ve never been very good at leaving it there.
And it isn’t all trawl net. We often coasteer around popular fishing marks – the same rocky ground that makes for good jumps snags tackle constantly, so anglers lose line, hooks and weights there all the time. In the last five years we’ve picked hundreds of bits of line, hooks and tackle out of the rocks, and freed twelve entangled birds.
Something we’ve always done
Hauling ghost gear out has been part of a Tenby Adventure trip for about as long as there have been Tenby Adventure trips. A guide spots a snagged pot, or a length of trawl net wedged in a gully, and out it comes – strapped to a kayak, stuffed in a dry bag, or hauled up a climb. For years we didn’t call it anything. Now it has a name: Ghosteering.
Every coasteering session and kayak trip is a potential Ghosteering trip. If we find gear that’s safe to carry, we bring it out, and guests are welcome to lend a hand. You come for the jumps and the caves; you might go home having helped carry a killer net off the coast.
Where the gear goes: nets become kayaks
Everything we recover goes to Odyssey Innovation’s Net Regeneration Scheme collection point at Milford Haven, where recovered fishing gear is recycled into new things – including kayaks. The scheme is endorsed by the Global Ghost Gear Initiative and was rolled out along the Welsh coast with Welsh Government backing. We like the arithmetic of it: nets that spent years quietly fishing on their own end up as boats.
What we’d love next is the full circle – paddling kayaks made from gear we carried out ourselves. We’re working on it, and in the meantime we only claim what’s actually happening (there’s a whole page about that habit – see our impact).
The big one
We know where a big one is: a large bundle of fishing net on the coast near Bullslaughter Bay. It’s too much for a casual haul, so it needs a proper plan – the right tides, the right sea state, the right season for the wildlife, and the right permissions (it’s on the Castlemartin Range, where access is restricted, so please don’t go looking for it).
When we get the green light, it’ll be our biggest recovery yet. We’ll bring cameras.
Come and lend a hand
Every booking keeps a team of habitual coast-cleaners on the water. Come coasteering or kayaking with us and you’re already part of it.
