Can't you call or send a letter instead?

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. Onboard the "grey whale", our biggest inflatable, the surroundings reminded us of scenes from movies like the Pirates of the Caribbean and we were almost certain that the Black Pearl would suddenly emerge from the fog in front of us. Fortunately, to help us navigate the fog, find the pirate fishing vessels and avoid the haunted fictional ones, our second mate Adrian was also in the inflatable keeping radio contact with the ship and relaying the coordinates from the radar to the driver.

Our standard approach is to find and identify the vessels that show up on the radar and if they are fishing we try to make contact by radio or get the inflatable close enough for a face to face dialogue so we can see what they're up to and give them some information about the campaign. Of course not everyone is keen on speaking to us - I must say that it's quite curious how the Dutch beam trawler crews seem to have missed a lot more of their English classes than their fellow countrymen engaged in a bit less destructive methods of fishing. The only thing the beam trawler crews seem to have remembered from that time is how to ensure others that they don’t speak any English – in perfect English. Most of them choose to just ignore our efforts to make contact.

But the Dutch are not the only ones out here, there also seem to be a lot of unhappy Danish fishermen on the sea today. The best thing was probably when we went up to the side of one of the Danish trawlers. As usual Hanne exchanged a few words with the skipper who was standing by the railing, asking him questions like what he was trawling for and what kind of gear he used and so on, but when she tried to hand him an envelope with our campaign information the skipper strongly refused to take the envelope and suggested that we should try to call him or send him a letter instead.

I'm really happy to be out at sea again, but it has already been a long day and as I’m writing this the grey whale has once again disappeared into the fog to check out a few more radar blips before we lose the light and the milky white that surrounds us turns in to a thick black darkness.