To return to the surface click on the icon...

M.V. Arctic Sunrise

Crew update 16 April

The lights of the Hoshin Maru No. 62 are rapidly swallowed by the gathering daylight. Yes indeed, we have found them! Two days ago a helicopter search produced three Japanese longline tuna boats about thirty miles from the Sunrise. They were sprung picking up their longline, so they were easy to catch up to.

The remaining daylight was spent observing their catch from the bridge of the Sunrise, and a meagre one it was too. That night we watched as the ship laid out around 90 KM of longline, the hooks on branchlines shooting out of the stern at the rate of one every five seconds or so. Earlier on it was very hard to see what was happening with regard to birds diving on the baits, but in the early hours of the morning it was clear there were birds around the stern.

In the morning a large inflatable was launched with a crew to observe from close quarters exactly what was happening when the ship hauled its line, and there, within a matter of minutes, a pitiful, bedraggled drowned petrel was hauled up the side of the ship hanging by a hook through its beak: another victim of the untimely end that meets tens of thousands of seabirds in the Southern Ocean each year.

Some research indicates that over forty thousand albatrosses die this way each year in the Southern Ocean! Whatever the true number, it is without doubt unsustainable, and a major impact on albatrosses and other seabirds such as petrels. The inflatable stands station 20m or so from the starboard side of the longliner, waiting with its crew of photographer, video and bird observer, who are there to document what is caught.

It takes an hour before they see the first Southern Bluefin Tuna: the ship slows, and a half dozen deckhands in blue overalls and white hard hats crane over the side, each with a large gaff hook on a long pole. The branch line - or snood - is detatched from the mainline and the catch hauled up alongside the boat until it is underneath the gaffs. The fishermen then grab the fish by the gills with the gaffs, and then drag it up the side of the ship onto the deck. There it is prepared for freezing, and rushed off to the freezer.

This fish are extremely valuable, commanding prices of over $100 a kilo in the sashimi markets of Japan. The value to the Japanese of this fish is evident when one sees how few are caught. Everyone on board is astonished that they are still fishing for these fish when they catch so few of them, the catches observed from a full set of line being literally in the order of a half dozen Southern Bluefin.

That anyone should be allowed to hunt such a scarce creature seems astonishing, yet sadly it is entirely symptomatic of the current state of most of the world's fisheries, where the mentallity of these large, industrial scale fishing operations is singlemindedly slash and burn: buy now and pay later. And one thing is sure: all will pay for the selfishness of a few.