It’s often surprisingly hard to find truly fresh local seafood along the British coast, even though we’re avoiding fishing boats and dodging crab pots all the time.
Prompted by the splendid seafood shack by the Oban ferry terminal, which we’ve visited multiple times on each of our three round Britain cruises, I’ve started this little list of worthwhile places. Suggestions welcome.
The ideal is a restaurant, cabin or takeaway so close to fishing boats, oyster farms and mussel beds that you could order a pile of just-landed freshness like a plateau de fruits de mer, which is so easy to find in many French harbours. In Britain, these places are still few and far between, and usually expensive.
Just as good, and a lot cheaper, it’s great to be able to buy the fish and shellfish from a retailer and take them back to your boat. The Oban Seafood Hut is one of those rare outlets that does both, and at a reasonable price. We sat next to an American tourist there defeated by the size of his plate of lobster, crab, mussels, prawns, langoustines, cockles and whelks.
For seafood enthusiasts, our coasts have nothing to offer as good as cruising France. But I can vouch for the fact that it’s a lot better in Britain than it used to be 40 years ago. That was when a cruise from Harwich to Plymouth proved a terrible disappointment to an old friend, the writer, seafood enthusiast and shellfish guru, Fred Basnett. For him, the English channel turned out to be a watery desert.
It was only after we’d started that I discovered that Fred, not a regular sailor, had imagined that he would be gorging on bountiful supplies of freshly-landed fish and shellfish as we pottered along from harbour to harbour, giving him plenty of raw material to write about. How wrong can you be.
Worse still, he’d crewed for us to Holland the year before on a cruise timed – at his suggestion – to celebrate the opening of the Dutch mussel dredging season. For reasons I can’t recall, the opening was delayed a month that year, and a downcast Fred was horrified by the frozen mussels that were the only ones on sale.
In this new attempt, after searching vainly for something better than fish and chips at 6 different harbours, it wasn’t until dawn in Weymouth that we finally set eyes on fresh local crab, lobster and langoustines: whole crates of them. But they were being loaded straight from the boats onto the back of French lorries, and none was available in town, as we found out later that morning when we scoured the place.
Fred had to leave for home later from Plymouth, a disappointed man, after his quest failed again in both Dartmouth and Salcombe. Sadly, he missed our very first success, a bag of fresh oysters fetched by dinghy on the Helford River and opened and eaten in the cockpit.
In fact, Fred didn’t give up. He volunteered to rejoin us much later on the way back along the French coast, and rated the St Vaast oysters alone a fitting reward for his trouble. We went on to sample Fécamp, Dieppe (still the most memorable fish stew I have ever had anywhere) and even Boulogne’s sea produce.
Fred’s not around to try again, but I think he’d be a little more contented now on a British coastal cruise…
tide by tide 