What Remains of the Fleet
Before dawn in Port Seton, Robert Johnson and his son—also named Robert—leave the harbour and head into the North Sea. Their work follows an old and exacting rhythm: setting the trawl, watching the weather, hauling the net, sorting the catch and returning with whatever the sea has yielded.
They are among the remaining fishermen working from a harbour where fishing once shaped the local economy and collective identity. After declining crustacean catches forced them to sell one of their two trawlers, father and son continued with a single boat. Photographed over the course of one working day, their story reveals what the contraction of a fishing industry looks like from inside one family.
PORT SETON, SCOTLAND | 2017 | FISHING, SOCIETY, WORK
On 31 August 2017, Italian photojournalist Simone Padovani joined Robert Johnson senior and his son Robert aboard their trawler as they left Port Seton, a small harbour on the Firth of Forth in East Lothian, Scotland. From departure to the unloading of the catch, the reportage follows an entire working day at sea and documents the labour, knowledge and uncertainty behind a form of fishing increasingly pushed towards the margins.
Port Seton is one of the few harbours in East Lothian to have retained an active fishing fleet. For generations, fishing was not simply an occupation here: it structured family life, the harbour economy and the community’s relationship with the North Sea. By 2017, however, the local fleet had contracted sharply, and many fishermen had already left the industry. The Johnsons had been forced to sell one of their two trawlers after a decline in crustacean yields made operating both vessels economically unsustainable.
Their experience belongs to a wider transformation of Scotland’s coastal fisheries. In 2016, 85 per cent of the fishing vessels registered in Scotland’s eastern marine region measured less than ten metres, illustrating the predominance of small boats and family-run operations along this coast. These businesses worked within increasingly narrow margins, exposed to variations in catch, fuel and maintenance costs, fishing regulations, market prices and the physical risks of the North Sea.
The photographs remain close to the material reality of the work. Robert senior navigates and monitors the weather forecast from the cabin. Father and son operate the winches, control the trawling wires and pull the net aboard. The catch is emptied onto the deck, where prawns and other crustaceans are separated, inspected and packed into boxes. Ropes, machinery, wet clothing and repeated gestures reveal a profession governed by experience and cooperation, but also by forces that neither man can control.
At the centre of the story is the relationship between two generations. The elder Robert carries knowledge acquired over decades; the younger performs the same work in a sector whose future is far less secure. Their shared name reinforces the sense of continuity, while the shrinking fleet around them raises a more difficult question: whether that continuity can survive beyond the present generation.
What Remains of the Fleet is not a nostalgic account of a vanishing occupation. It is an intimate examination of economic contraction, inherited labour and the erosion of a coastal culture. Through one boat and one family, the reportage makes visible the human consequences of changes usually described through landing figures, fleet statistics and policy debates. What is disappearing is not only a number of vessels, but a body of practical knowledge and a way of organising life around the sea.
