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Peterhead, Aberdeenshire

Dawn arrives slowly over the harbour, the luminous blue of the new day mingling with the inky black of night, brightened by a few pink-tinged clouds. There are points of light from a handful of trawlers that have returned from the the North Sea. Just around the corner long refrigeration lorries are beginning to arrive and back up next to the auction house, ready to receive the day's catch, glistening in lines of blue boxes.

But could today see a new dawn for the Scottish fishing industry, or another gloomy outlook?

Fisheries ministers in Brussels have agreed a 25% cut on "the mortality rate" (the cut will happen next year, based on this year's figures). Although this sounds devastating, it is being sold as "catch less, land more" by both the industry and the UK and Scottish governments.

The main idea is to allow cod to breed again, but the tweak in the wording to "reducing mortality" is aimed at getting rid or the ludicrous practice of fishermen catching fish and then throwing them back dead. The cod, being dead, can't breed but neither can the fishermen make any money out of them.

Some Scottish fishermen are embracing the new ideas with enthusiasm.

On board the Fairline, John Buchan, his son-in-law and his grandson are hard at work putting a brand new net onto their trawler's haulage system. The three generations are investing not only a lot of money - £9,000 - but a lot of hope in this new net. The idea, which you might think a novel one for a net, is to allow some fish to escape.

Whereas most such nets have meshing of eight inches (20.3cm), this has 48 inches, which looks ludicrous, a net fit only to catch large sharks, you might think. But John explains to me it doesn't quite work that way. The huge holes are near the beginning of the long trawling net, shaped like an elongated sock, and the cod dive down to escape. Other fish tend to stay where they are and are herded back into the end of the net, where the mesh is the normal eight inches.

John and his family are pioneers and believe this radical departure will help them stay in business.

In the fish auction room the price of cod and haddock and whiting are shouted loudly and the auctioneers move quickly from one line of blue boxes to the next. They say the price is OK at the moment. The people I speak to are fiercely protective of what's left of their shrunken industry. No one wants to talk on camera, but on a "no names" basis they are scathing.

..... is absolutely right to chide me for reflecting a bureaucratic view, rather than that on the ground. People here say there's plenty of cod in the North Sea and the scientists' reports are way behind what is really happening. Many of them feel passionately about saving what is left of their industry and I get the impression they think the nets and so on are yet another fad from the politicians, but they'll go along with it just in case it helps.

The industry and the politicians are promoting the new ideas under the rubric "catch less, land more". But we won't know if this will be true in practice for another couple of weeks. The landing - and so selling - of cod has to wait for another meeting, another negotiation, which will set the quotas for catching and selling cod. If the British politicians don't get the increase they want it could be a case of "catch less, sell less, earn less".

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