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.
It was already beginning to darken when we got to them but bringing Danish butter cookies proved to be a good move - we were invited onboard on one of the ships where we had some good coffee and a pleasant and very informative chat with the Dutch crewmen. Like all fishermen they were of course not doing any destructive fishing at all but were happy to inform us which ones of the other types of fishing vessels were doing the real damage to our oceans. And like most fishermen they couldn't really get their heads around the idea of marine reserves. I guess they just don't see what water that you don't fish is supposed to be good for.
These particular vessels were doing something called pair trawling, where each vessel has one end of the net and they travel parallel to each other a couple of hundred meters apart dragging the net along the bottom between them. When they haul their net they bring the boats together and one of them receives the others line and bring the trawl onboard where they sort and gut the fish. After some light coaxing we were also able to get onboard the other ship and document the process. Still being just a city dweller with a pair of sea legs I'm almost getting used to being on these fishing boats by now, but this was my first time to witness the hauling process first hand.
You can watch a video clip from the encounter below.
