I caught my first fish with my dad. It was a mackerel, of course. For generations of British children it has been the same: a string of feathers dropped off a harbour wall on a summer evening, a sudden jagging on the line, and a flash of green and silver coming up through the water. Mackerel are the fish that taught most of us to fish. For many, including me, that moment was where a lifelong connection to the sea began.

Then there was the eating. Few things in life beat a mackerel caught at sunset and cooked on the beach within the hour: gutted at the water’s edge, laid over a barbecue, the skin blistering and crisping while the flesh stays rich and sweet. Eaten with your fingers, with sand between your toes and the sea going pink behind you. It is one of the simplest and most joyful connections there is between people, place and the food the sea provides, and for a lot of families it has been part of summer for as long as anyone can remember.

This summer, that moment was much harder to come by. Anglers from Cornwall to the Channel coast told us the same story: empty feathers, quiet piers, charter boats working hard for a handful of fish. Bait that people used to catch for themselves was being bought in, sometimes shipped from the other side of the world. For many it was the poorest mackerel season they could remember.

So, when the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) published its advice this week, recommending a 2027 catch of 352,938 tonnes, more than double its advice for this year, the reaction from the coast was one of disbelief. How can the scientists be recommending more fishing when the fish have disappeared?

The answer lies in how the advice works. Scientists judge the health of a fish stock by the amount of adult fish old enough to breed. For mackerel, they draw a safety line at 3.07 million tonnes of breeding fish. Below that line, there may not be enough adults to produce the next generation.

Last year, the stock was thought to have dropped below that line, so the scientists switched to an emergency setting and advised a very small catch of 174,357 tonnes for 2026. By contrast, in 2014 the scientists advised that up to a million tonnes could be caught, and more than 1.4 million tonnes were actually landed. That alone shows how far the stock has fallen. This year, they estimate there are 3.2 million tonnes of breeding fish, just 4% above the line. Crossing back over it, even by a whisker, switches the advice back to its normal setting, and the recommended catch more than doubles as a result. The number of fish has not.

The stock is still well short of the 4.1 million tonnes the scientists consider healthy, and it is still being fished harder than it can sustain. Just over a decade ago, in 2014, there were more than 13 million tonnes of breeding mackerel, around four times as many as today. What improvement there is comes mainly from one good year of young fish, born in 2024, and even that has so far been measured in only one survey. Even if countries stick to the new advice, the scientists put the chance of the stock slipping back below the safety line by 2028 at one in three.

This is not a recovery. It is a stock standing on the edge, having taken a half-step back from it.