Of all the vexing regulations that Brexit has thrust upon Paul Knight’s shellfish exporting business, the one he finds most absurd is this: Before he can deliver his crabs and lobsters to France and Spain, they must be certified by a veterinarian.
“I don’t mean anything against the vets — they are lovely people,” said Mr. Knight, managing director of PDK Shellfish, as he and his staff prepared the voluminous forms now needed to send a truck down from Scotland. “But when did you take your pet lobster to the vet?”
Brexit has tied Mr. Knight and other Scottish exporters in knots, adding reams of paperwork and extra checkpoints that delay the transport and causing more live shellfish to die en route. When it took full effect, in January 2021, Brexit ended an era of easy trade with his markets in continental Europe. Mr. Knight likens the impact to a bomb exploding under his firm.
It hasn’t done him much good personally either. He has started smoking, a habit he thought he had kicked. He has little time for cycling or other exercise and works every weekend. The result, he says, is a weight gain of more than 80 pounds.
But the impact has also been felt right through the shellfish trade, from the fishing crews on Scottish islands that catch lobster, crab and langoustine, right through to those who serve it to customers in upmarket restaurants in France.
The Catch
As dawn breaks over the rocky coastline of western Scotland, a pair of dolphins race alongside the Dignity Jay, a 30-foot boat headed out to sea to haul shellfish traps from deep beneath the waves.
Slowing to a halt, the vessel sways and sea gulls circle while the traps are winched on board and emptied, with shiny black lobsters and muddy brown crabs pulled free and stored on deck.
None of this catch will stay in Britain. This is the start of a 900-mile journey to customers in France, who will pay top dollar for seafood most British people rarely eat.
Before Brexit that was relatively simple. But now, because of all the extra paperwork required, Alastair Mackie, the Dignity Jay’s skipper, must deliver his shellfish earlier. So he will finish fishing by 11.30 a.m., rather than 5 p.m., to get his catch on a ferry from the Isle of Mull to Oban on the Scottish mainland. Each week, the early finish cuts one day’s catch in half.
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Mr. Mackie, 62, who never supported Britain’s withdrawal from the E.U. and who has fished these waters for four decades, estimates that the reduced fishing time costs him more than £20,000, or about $25,000, a year.
“That,” he said as he steered his boat back to land, “is the downside of Brexit.”
The Pack
On the day of Britain’s Brexit referendum in 2016, Mr. Knight did not vote because of a dental operation, but he has little doubt how he would vote now.
“Brexit is torment — it’s horrendous,” said Mr. Knight, speaking in the office in Oban that churns out the documentation each delivery now requires to cross the French border.
He estimates that the extra work costs PDK £150,000 a year — money that must be made up by increasing exports. But that, in turn, has raised stress levels at a business that began 27 years ago when Mr. Knight bought a van and negotiated a load of crab from Mr. Mackie.
In an anomaly of commerce, Britain, surrounded by bountiful waters, imports much of the seafood it eats — typically cod for fish and chips — yet exports much of what it catches, including crab, lobster and langoustine.
Each week, PDK Shellfish sends several large trucks from the port-side depot at Oban to France and Spain, filled with tons of seafood kept alive in tanks of seawater through which air is pumped. The cargo this time will include crab and lobster from the Dignity Jay and langoustine from another boat, the Fern.
Every delivery is a race against time. Dead shellfish is worthless, and the longer it is out of the sea, the greater the chance it will perish. Brexit has worsened the odds.
It’s not the only complication. A strike in France means PDK’s trucks need to leave even earlier. But it’s primarily the extra paperwork that has businesses like PDK crying foul because it affects every consignment. Under Brexit rules, every vehicle needs an exhaustive printout listing every kilo of species transported and the details of each boat that supplied it.
Upstairs in PDK’s office in Oban, Anne Maclean said her administrative workload had doubled or tripled.
“The stress is massive. I see it in Paul, I see it in me,” she said.
Preparing data for the veterinarian is arguably more nerve-racking. “Even if it’s a point that’s wrong it will come back to you — if it should be 0.2 and you put 0.3 — it’s that specific,” said Carol Smith, who organizes that. An error could have “catastrophic effects,” she added, joking that besides anything else, “it would probably kill Paul.”
Perhaps the biggest strain is knowing that a cargo worth up to £150,000 could be rejected by French customs because of a glitch in the paperwork, or if a truck driver spills coffee over the documents.
“Fortunately, it hasn’t happened yet but that’s where the pressure comes on,” Mr. Knight said. “Since Brexit we have had to get everything 100 percent right.”
The Drive
A Scania truck filled with around £80,000 worth of lobster, langoustine and crab leaves PDK’s depot at 8:20 p.m. on Sunday and its first, brief stop is at a depot in Glasgow to pick up the veterinary certificate.
There it is met by Andrew Graham, who will take it to France and back. He will usually make a trip like this once every two weeks, accompanied by another driver if the journey continues into Spain. This time he is on his own and will drive through the night. He says he does not mind the solitude.
By dawn on Monday, Mr. Graham, 29, is not far from Portsmouth on England’s southern coast, from where a ferry will leave later for France. Including mandatory breaks to fight fatigue, he has been on the road for more than eight hours.
Mr. Graham voted for Brexit in 2016. “It hasn’t been what it was made out to be,” he said, driving through the morning traffic of southern England. Instead, he said, it’s “a bit of a pest.”
The wait at Portsmouth for the ferry to sail is long this time — about four hours — and Mr. Graham gets some sleep in the cab. On the other side of the English Channel there will inevitably be a delay at a veterinary inspection facility, a few minutes’ drive from the port at Caen in France.
Trucks are inspected in the order they enter. “It can take an hour, two hours or three or four hours,” said Mr. Graham, whose longest wait was five hours. “You lose a lot of time there.”
The Drop-Off
Driving off the ferry late Monday, Mr. Graham is 10th in a line of 12 trucks. That means almost two hours’ wait for the French veterinary inspection and it is nearly midnight before he is on the road to drop part of his load near St. Malo. Next stop is a seafood company in the town of Plouescat.
The final call, midmorning, is Melesse, outside Rennes, where hundreds of gallons of Scottish seawater are released from the tanks inside the truck, gushing onto grass and tarmac and down a drain. Mr. Graham picks up a few escaped crabs and returns them to their tanks.
Inside the warehouse at Ame Haslé, a wholesaler, around 260 pounds of lobsters, about 2,200 pounds of crabs and around 2,400 pounds of langoustines are unloaded into tanks of aerated seawater.
Maxime Sureau, who specializes in commercial seafood at Ame Haslé, said that Brexit disruption had initially caused his firm to reduce orders from Scotland, but that they were back to previous levels. “We have found a way of organizing things to make it much simpler,” he said.
Even so, he added, inspection delays made it impossible to know when deliveries would arrive.
In Rennes, Scottish langoustines adorn the seafood platter at La Taverne de la Marine, a restaurant which has specialized in fish and shellfish for four decades and whose owner, Frédéric Gire, says he uses only the best.
Despite their long journey, the langoustines are fresh, firm and strongly flavored.
Mr. Gire praised their quality but noted that Scottish produce had become more expensive. “After Brexit, we noticed immediately a price increase,” he said, estimating it at around 20 percent.
And, while the stress, disruption and cost of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union is mainly borne by British companies, there seems little gloating in Rennes.
Asked what he thought of Brexit overall, Mr. Gire deliberated for a moment before answering: “Personally, I think it’s a shame.”
Produced by Mona Boshnaq