Loïc Escoffier, an eco-friendly fisherman in Saint-Malo (Portrait)

Audio 04:31

Loïc Escoffier, ecological fisherman on his boat in Saint-Malo.

© RFI/Alexis Bedu

By: Alexis Bedu Follow

2 mins

There is a lot of talk about protecting the oceans and their resources in Brest, on the occasion of the Ocean Summit which ends this Friday.

Loïc Escoffier is a fisherman in Saint-Malo, still in Brittany.

To make his fishing activity less polluting, he decided to install solar panels on one of his four boats.

Portrait.

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He's a Breton who runs everywhere even when he's not sailing.

Loï Escoffier is a business manager, fisherman and skipper.

He will also take part in the next

.

And also deeply ecological.

On his gillnetter, a fishing vessel using nets, he installed photovoltaic panels.

That is 100,000 euros of investment for this experiment, which is still a little too young to draw any real conclusions.

The fishing world has yet to go green.

In the bay of Granville, Loïc Escoffier finds himself quite alone.

A hydrogen catamaran 

The transfer of licenses for the fishing zones of the islands of Jersey and Guernsey.

This is precisely what prevents Loïc Escoffier from launching another project: a hydrogen-powered fishing boat.

The Malouin wants to replace the oldest of its gillnets, the

, with a new hydrogen catamaran.

But it gets stuck on the British side. 

And yet yes, the climate emergency is there.

Loïc Escoffier observes him on every trip to sea and he started at the age of 15... he embarks on factory boats to fish between the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

What he sees revolts him.  

In 2016, Loic Escoffier took over the family armament and specialized in shellfish fishing: whelks, lobsters, spider crabs. His best friend Victorien Erussard is the founder of

, the first hydrogen vessel around the world.

He accompanies him in his new challenges

Loïc Escoffier wants to change things and asks: does this go through politicians in this year of French presidential elections?

But rapidly reducing the carbon footprint seems essential to him.

Bottom trawling emits as much CO2 as air transport.

This is demonstrated by a recent scientific study.

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