This area is one of the biodiversity hotspots in the Barents. It is surrounded by shallow banks, and is a highly productive ocean area as the edge of the pack ice is nearby for much of the year. The entire region and the banks are of major importance to marine life, especially fish such as cod, haddock, capelin, polar cod and Greenland halibut. There is a large biomass of shrimp and many species of baleen whales in the nearby deep oceanic trench called Hopen Deep. The island is also an important hibernation spot for polar bears during the winter when they can simply walk across the pack ice from Svalbard. It is of course, also a popular area for fishing trawlers and illegal transfers of fish to freezer ships, which is why we are here, documenting and policing.

Hopen Island is a long ice-covered spit of rock some 16 miles long, and less than a mile wide, running in an NNE-SSW direction. It looks like someone simply built a 1000-foot wall in front of the ship in the middle of nowhere and put it in our way. The island has no natural bays or harbours, and landing here is notoriously difficult to do on in the best of weather. Discovered by an English whaling ship in 1613, and the skipper named the island after this ship, the Hopewell.

Since we have not found any illegal trawlers, just a few Russian long-liners and trawlers that the Russian coastguard confirms have legal quotas, we are now sailing towards the next area where illegal fishing and transfer has been documented before. Riding our bow wave is a large school of Atlantic white-beaked dolphins, a sure sign that the oceans are still healthy in this remote region.

- Brad