April 2007

Follow the crew of the Arctic Sunrise on their campaign for Marine Reserves in our North Sea Tour blog

Heading in to a beautiful and sunny Bergen on the Norwegian coast, this first leg of the tour is coming to an end. This is where some of us will disembark and new people will join to take our places. Sitting on the heli-deck as we slowly make our way past the spectacular scenery Hanne and I were summarising some of the things we had learned on the trip.

One thing we both have noticed is that a lot of the fishermen as well as others in the industry we have come across during these weeks seem to have had the idea that Greenpeace are against all kinds of fishing and therefore not interested in a dialogue with us. This is of course not the case, and as we started talking about this Hanne told me an interesting story of her first hand experiences of the modern changes of the fishing industry.

Follow the crew of the Arctic Sunrise on their campaign for Marine Reserves in our North Sea Tour blog

From Portia: As deck hand, I am on watch with the captain from 4 to 8 morning and evening, which means I enjoy both the sunset and the sunrise. My day begins with a wake up call at 3.45am. I grab a cup of tea and banana and hope the caffeine and fruit will sustain me for an hour before I do a safety round, checking that no water is flooding onto the Arctic Sunrise, there are no signs of fire and that everything is generally in ship shape.

Follow the crew of the Arctic Sunrise on their campaign for Marine Reserves in our North Sea Tour blog

Things can really turn around fast on the ship. Last night, just as I posted yesterday's blog entry, we came across a pair of interesting looking ships trawling together for cod and immediately launched a boat to investigate.

Follow the crew of the Arctic Sunrise on their campaign for Marine Reserves in our North Sea Tour blog

Cod can live over 25 years and grow over 2m long, but few in the North Sea ever live long enough to get bigger than this

The most exiting part of the day was probably when we had some more, and a bit more advanced, boat training. Other than that today has mostly been a long and pretty uneventful boat ride to a new search area, but it got me thinking of a conversation a few of us were having a couple of nights ago about over-fishing and when someone brought up the famous cod example from the Grand Banks.

While the Arctic Sunrise chases trawlers fishing destructively in the North Sea, a large campaign team is challenging exhibitors at the Brussels Seafood Fair with one message – "Is Your Seafood Sustainable?" And after two days we've saturated the venue with this message, creating the 'buzz' we were hoping for, it really is the word everyone is using right now! This, despite a somewhat over-reactive clampdown by the local police on activists displaying banners and leafleting outside the venue. So much for freedom of speech in the European capital…

Follow the crew of the Arctic Sunrise on their campaign for Marine Reserves in our North Sea Tour blog

Martin getting the message across to the skipper of a Danish trawler

After a productive stay in the small fishing town of Hanstholm we set sail and headed out to sea again only to find – fog! Yes today the North Sea is full of it and the fog horn has had to work on overtime, giving everyone working on deck a slight case of tinnitus. Although it did make our job a bit trickier the fog couldn't stop us from finding or engaging the fishing vessels out here.

Brussels Seafood Expo 2007: the world's largest

Yesterday saw the start of the world's largest seafood trading event – the Brussels Seafood Expo 2007. Between the 24 and 26 April seafood companies from all over the planet will attend the Expo, where millions of euros worth of seafood are bought and sold. Much of this seafood comes from stocks that are massively over-exploited and caught using fishing gear that is highly destructive of the marine environment. So 35 Greenpeace campaigners from across Europe have converged on the site to engage with business people from the international seafood trade and ask them - what are you doing to make your industry more sustainable?

Follow the crew of the Arctic Sunrise on their campaign for Marine Reserves in our North Sea Tour blog

Apparently you can't trust the truck drivers of the sea for reliable weather forecasts and we are once again forced to head in closer to land. This time we decided to skip the anchor and get alongside right in the lion's den, the Danish fishing town called Hanstholm, where a lot of the trawlers we are looking for also have chosen to seek refuge from the stormy seas. Being surrounded by all these beam trawlers here in Hanstholm got me thinking about how truly bizarre it is that the bottom trawling methods they are using are actually legal.