Vigilance

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I told the skipper "You shouldn't fish with a Belize flag if you are Taiwanese, you know Belize has no quota." He said "Yes, yes," but nothing happened. We let it go, but we reported the vessel to Belize, and the Belize registry reported back to us that the vessel got fined.

To save time, pirate fishing vessels don't usually take their catch back to harbour, but instead transfer it to large refrigerated transport vessels called reefers. Most of these are flagged in Panama but belong to Japanese companies. Such transfers have never been documented before, so we were lucky to find the reefer Hatsukari in action and to record what happened.

First, the Cambodia-flagged fishing vessel Benny 87 came along side, lying against big fender buoys so the ships didn't bang. Then cranes on the Hatsukari reached into Benny 87 and pulled out the illegally caught frozen bigeye tuna like a giant bunch of grapes, but steaming because they were so cold. We let the transfer go ahead so we could get evidence, but we reported it to Japan, Cambodia, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and other interested agencies.

But Greenpeace stopped the next transshipment alright! When the Panama-flagged vessel Toyou drew up, we went out in our inflatables and our action people climbed right onto the giant fenders stopping the fishing vessels from unloading. The captain of the vessel really lost it. At one point he threatened to haul up the fenders. They are big ships, so it's very high up, and this would have endangered our action people. Our skipper talked him out of it.

I went back to the reefer and asked the captain "Can I come and talk to you?" Finally he said "Yes, but no camera." He pretended he had no idea that what he was doing was against the law. I got him to sign a paper saying he would never do it again. The Hatsukari tried again and again to do illegal transshipping, but Greenpeace activists prevented them. Finally they gave up because they couldn't waste any more time.

In Japan they took our evidence about the Hatsukari really seriously. They confiscated all the documents and held the ship for nearly two months before it offloaded its tuna. The ICCAT had already banned imports of Bluefin tuna and swordfish from certain FOC countries. Now they've added bigeye tuna to the list. The Japanese authorities are used to being against Greenpeace - on whaling for example. When we're on their side they almost find it embarrassing. It's good because it shows that we can work with all countries to end this type of environmental abuse."

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