Over the past 2 years Greenpeace has campaigned for a global moratorium on 'high seas bottom trawling' - the most destructive fishing practice in use today. We first sailed the Rainbow Warrior into the Tasman Sea off NZ to track down and document bottom trawlers at work in June 2004. We took that evidence to the United Nations. In October 2004 we took the Esperanza into the North Atlantic and confronted the bottom trawlers there. In June 2005 the Rainbow Warrior returned to the Tasman and took action to stop bottom trawlers at work - we recorded damming evidence and once again took it to the United Nations. In July 2005 we took the Esperanza to the Grand Banks off Canada in the North West Atlantic and continued documenting and taking action against bottom trawling.
This weblog is a record of the four expeditions.
October 5, 2005
A deep sea road show down under
In New Zealand the 'How much more proof do you need?' deep sea road show is underway ... Bottom trawling in international waters is destroying deep sea life. We've got the proof and we're taking it to the people! Check out the roadblog here
The Queen left the ghostly Lootus 2 with her nets still down in the water. I'll never forget sitting alongside that trawler in the fog and looking up at the rusty hull and the large round dangling lights, which hung across the deck. We couldn't see anyone on board at all. It seemed as if the ship was running all by itself with nobody to haul the nets in. As soon as we pushed off towards Halifax on the Esperanza we noticed that the Lootus 2 finally stopped for hauling after 18 hours of having those nets down in the deep. It's upsetting to think about that ship still out there tearing up the sea floor along with so many others. We didn't stop deep sea destruction in international waters because we need the UN to do that but we went out there to tell a story and I think we told it very well. The bottom trawlers out there in the NAFO area might be hidden in fog but we've unveiled their actions to the world. It's up to governments now to make the right decision by putting in place a moratorium on high seas bottom trawling and granting deep sea biodiversity the reprieve it deserves. You can help by sending them an e.mail.
Once again, the Esperanza is docked in Halifax by the Maritime Museum. We have an open ship today 10am-3pm and all are welcome for a free tour of the Espy. The first person to arrive at the ship and mention the weblog will get a Greenpeace T-shirt.
Hope to see you soon despite the miserable weather.
Lisa is sitting opposite me now and has been for the last two weeks. She looks tired, but she is smiling. It seems that she is writing a nice weblog...
We are on the way back. Steaming with 14 kn - 750 miles to Halifax. The tour is at the end and this part of the seamounts campaign is over. It was a great time for me here on the Esperanza. From the campaign side as well as from the personal side.
The following is from Flo, an activist and boat driver from Germany...
If I had come up to the bridge, probably 5 minutes earlier everything would have been different. There was a meeting in the chartroom and almost everyone was there and I stepped right into their discussion about what we could do with the Lootus 2, which was only 1 nautical mile to our starboard side and hidden by the fog. By the trawler's behaviour over the last 24 hours we could tell that they had not hauled their nets for over 14 hours, which was more than strange. The team decided to do something about it. What? Well, the banners with magnets worked the other time, but now we wanted something different. They chose an action with swimmers for a change, so the moment I stepped into the chartroom, they were looking for volunteers. The first thing I heard, was Luke saying: "There's one!" while pointing at me. That's how I became a swimmer. Actually, there was a list of people who had volunteered earlier for possible activities and there I was on the swimming list because in so me silly moment I must have lifted my arm, to volunteer as a swimmer. I can't remember why. Normally I don't like swimming, but that's a different story. This didn't seem to be very normal at all.
We came to the Grand Banks to document high seas bottom trawling and after we'd seen enough, we couldn't resist taking action against it. The past couple of days have completely blurred into one another leaving me feeling unsure of where to start telling you about how things have happened. Let's go back to Monday afternoon. We hadn't found any fishing vessels for the entire day on the western side of the Flemish Cap and we were heading south. We were coming to the end of our time at sea and we wanted to find a trawler with a bad history, which would help get our message out to the world that NAFO is not capable of managing this area and a moratorium on high seas bottom trawling is needed NOW!
Just a quickie to let you all know that we found the Lootus 2(the Estonian trawler we were looking for) yesterday afternoon! What a stroke of luck! We followed it all through the night even though it was going faster than us and in the morning we set out to do an action, which we have only just finished (It's now nearly midnight). I've been up since 3:40am so you're going to have wait until tomorrow to hear all about it I'm afraid but I've had the best day and there will be lots of blogging by me tomorrow, and hopefully some other crew will write about it from their perspective too. Wow! My head feels like Vegemite! I'm off to bed.
Yesterday we pulled off an action against a Spanish trawler, attaching a banner saying "deep sea destroyer" to the hull of the offending vessel. No doubt that information is available through the official web pages but if you only read them what you miss is the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. So that's what I'm going to tell you about, about how it happens from the moment we have the chance to do an action. The following account is roughly how it has taken place during this campaign.
The following is an account from Mike (chief mate) of what happened in yesterday's action against high seas bottom trawling...
The sun rose and some of the crew were out to watch it for its brief appearance. The rest watched with us as it disappeared again, half an hour later into dark rain filled clouds that took over the sky whilst we were launching the boats. The wind rose in the suns wake to a Beaufort force six, occasionally gusting to seven. Esperanza swung one way and then the other, making a lee to each side in order to launch the boats in the twelve foot swell. The Hurricane, with me as coxswain and Florian as crew were the first in the water. Florian, is a university student of environmental science from Germany, who joined the Esperanza as an activist in Halifax. He wears his long blond hair in dreads, and volunteers for everything all of the time.
We set out to paint the side of the Petur Jonsson today, with the question "Legal?". Here's an update from Bunny, our campaign coordinator...
It was an early start to the day and into three boats: paint boat, media boat and safety boat. The swell was pretty big so getting in the boats was a challenge and painting the side of the boat was also a big ask. We got to the Petur Jonsson around 8.30am. They were trawling at a decent speed for painting and the valient paint crew went at it with gusto, and as soon as the crew on board the Jonsson saw what they were doing they got the water hoses out onto to them. However, it was simply too hard to get the little word 'legal?' onto the side of the ship, so they moved to plan B which was to attach the same word on a banner with magnets but this didnt work either. So plan C, yes there was a plan C! They held the banner up under the bow of the ship with the name of the boat in full view. It was as good as it was going to get out there with the big swell and the hoses. We all came back to the ship after about two hours, pretty wet and cold but with some good shots which are going out now with the press release.
The following is by Chris, our onboard naturalist...
So here we are... the North West Atlantic Ocean, over 200 NM from the closest point of land, there is over 1500m of water beneath us and a vast deep blue oasis in every direction around us. We are priveledged to be sailing on the Esperanza, in all accounts a vessel of "Hope". Hope by name, hope by creed. A hope for the future of this aquatic paradise, a hope that our descendants will have the same opportunity to experience this natural wonder for themselves. A hope that the whales, the birds and the creatures of the deep will survive man's continuous plunder. A hope that this nobel voyage WILL make the difference, that a balance between man and nature may be found so that both may thrive.
I'm blogging in the campaign office on the Esperanza
It's been rather quiet the past couple of days since we haven't found many ships to document. We're on the West side of the Flemish Cap and we're now going to pump up the volume a little with the campaign. If you thought we simply came here to take a passive record of deep sea destruction, you were wrong!
His eyes are wide, like black liquid beauty staring at me, at us, while we handle him gently, taking him in turns to hold him in our arms. He does not look scared. His fine Somali features express only a sense of dignified tranquility, accepting the fact that he has become one of the most loved creatures by the sanitary personnel managing the little camp of tents close to the hospital. We all compete in trying to fill him with affection and attention. He is two, maybe three years old. He is a lovely gentle child, who is slowly succumbing to AIDS and his family are already wiped out. It is November 2000 and I find myself in Somaliland, (ex British Somalia), leading a development project in the area of Boroma, close to the Ethiopian border. It's an awful November when around 30 children will die at the hospital, ravaged by cholera, parasites or AIDS. That's a child a day, which is such a blow to our attempts to maintain them in life and there is a sense of desperate impotence filling our minds and nurturing the nightmares troubling our sleep.
We spent Monday night on the heels of a Spanish trawler ("Punta Robaleira"). They hauled at around 3am and we expect the trawl to take about 10 hours, as we are so much deeper here, so we went for a look around 8am. We tried calling them on the radio but there was no response. The trawler was fishing for Greenland halibut at about 700 meters. We returned to the Espy and went back when the trawlers speed slowed. We also sent a smaller inflatable to collect the bycatch. This time everyone was kitted out and prepared to get wet. As soon as the trawler stopped hauling they increased their speed to 10 knots and started weaving all over the place like a drunk elephant trying to flick a couple of fleas off his backside. Our inflatable stuck with them but after seeing them shut their bycatch shoot while we were sitting there it was clear that they had decided not to discharge while we were around so we returned to the ship.
We are now northwest of the Flemish Cap and have found several Spanish vessels fishing for Greenland halibut. The sea floor lies 800 meters below us.
This morning I fell back to sleep again after Marta (Spanish volunteer) came to wake me up at quarter to 4. It's getting harder and harder for me to get out of bed this early but luckily I was only a couple of minutes late for my watch. I hurried to the bridge with a cup of coffee and Thjis (third mate) told me we had several trawlers on the radar so we stayed within a few miles of the closest one ("Ana Gandon", a Spanish flagged vessel) and monitored her speed. When trawlers slow down it indicates that they are hauling (bringing in their nets) and that is the time when we need to go and look at their catch. I had been given instructions to wake half the crew any time after 6am if any hauling started and at 10 to 6 Morton (one of the mates) told me that the vessel had slowed down so we decided it was probably a good idea to do a wake up call.
The past couple of days, we've been documenting shrimp trawlers. Although this fishery does not produce a lot of bycatch we did find starfish, capelin, sponge and eelpout but not in any quantity. Many believe this is because there is not much else to get. The shrimp fishery developed on the heels of the collapse of the groundfish in this area, including cod. It's also been heavily trawled for 20 years so its not surprising. Maybe a better image for what has happened in NAFO is the empty bycatch net.
Yesterday was an action-packed day. In the morning the Sunna, (an Estonian trawler, catching shrimp - "northern prawns") requested information about our campaign over the radio. There were other shrimp trawlers around, which we wanted to document, but when a fisherman asks for information we don't waste any time getting it to him since usually this is the first step towards getting on board. Other trawlers seemed reluctant to haul their nets while a Greenpeace inflatable was close by and hanging around while nothing was happening soon started to feel like a waste of time for the crew on the African Queen so off they went to visit the Sunna, which was a few miles away.
The following update is from Bunny, our campaign coordinator...
We are now out in the heart of the Northwest Atlantic area and this is where some of the heaviest bottom trawling takes place. We are here because we want to demonstrate how destructive bottom trawling is to deep sea life and why a moratorium on high seas bottom trawling is needed now so that scientists can identify those areas that need protection from bottom trawling. Organisations like NAFO are ill equipped to do anything about it. NAFO has been solely concerned about fish since it started in 1979 and today is no different. Until it starts thinking about looking after the whole neighborhood of the deep sea rather than just one or two residents the problems will continue.
Tropical storm Franklin finally caught up with us yesterday. The storm had started to become exhausted on its route towards the north, and it was expected to die out today somewhere south from Greenland. We were hit by its tail, the waves were getting bigger and bigger, breaking to white horses and bringing back the dolphins to surf at our bow. The wind was most of the time behind us, and so Esperanza was surfing the ocean waves moving rather steadily. Just before dinner we changed courses, and the rolling got heavier. There was some heavy consumption of sea sickness pills around the medicine locker, the poop deck was getting wet and was therefore off limits, and all the watertight doors and portholes were secured.
This morning's 4-8am watch was blessed with a clear night sky to begin with and I saw a shooting star fall towards the glowing, red horizon just before the sun rose. It wasn't long before we were once again cloaked in thick white fog.
Today was quite slow since we didn't come across any fishing boats until late in the day. The most thrilling thing that happened on my watch was a Russian merchant ship appearing on our radar. We made contact with it and asked if it had seen any fishing vessels but the guy on the radio said no. We continued along the edge of the banks and navigated north of the tail.
Last night we found a ship on the high seas on our radar. It was near the tail of the Grand Banks we discovered over the radio that it was a Portuguese vessel which was bottom trawling for redfish. We asked if it would be possible to visit them in the morning and maybe come aboard but they left us waiting for an answer saying that they needed to check with their company.
