Not only for love
Sent from Nathalie onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Meditteranean
As we were traveling to the Mediterranean sea yesterday morning, one colleague told me this story as a joke: “Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian and it's all organised by the Swiss”…
We were on our way to join the Rainbow Warrior for the second leg of Defending Our Mediterranean Tour and it was a long day waiting to gather all the new comers: an English cameraman and a photographer, a Turkish deck mate and finally our Italian campaigner and a scientist volunteer diver, all here to document the sea life and damages of this specific area between Sicily and Tunisia called the Sicilian channel.
Later in the afternoon as we were waiting for the last persons at a terrace, we were part of an interesting spectacle which made us abandon our ice creams for a while. It was just before embarking all onto the Rainbow Warrior which was anchored at some cable-lengths at the entrance of the harbour (let’s say quite visibly).
In the quiet harbor of Trapani, the coastguards had arrested a small fishing boat (of about 10 meters) and were starting an ostentatious control of it; we just had to cross the road to see ourselves. A relatively important volume of the cabin was packed with a fold red net: a driftnet. Those specific nets have been made illegal by several laws from 2003 but they still used (for more details, see last year's webstory A swordfish, that clearly was not adult, was removed from the deck; a very poor catch if it’s was the only.
Now, the end of the joke: “Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lover's Swiss, the police German and it's all organised by the Italians.”
It was of course pleasant to have to see that fishing activities are controlled. Italian authorities looked to apply the law very carefully this time. When we left they were about to confiscate the net.
I can’t help to be dubitative: was Greenpeace emblematic ship on sight that provoked this deployment of forces? – Anyway, we’d liked to see Italians organizing the protection of the Mediterranean Sea more often.
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