Follow the crew of the Arctic Sunrise on their campaign for Marine Reserves in our North Sea Tour blog
That's more like it! Everything turned around this morning and a weather window opened up giving us perfect sailing conditions - calm and sundrenched glittering waters. It didn’t take us long to locate a cluster of trawlers and we have spent most of the day document their operations. We managed to get ourselves invited to go onboard a couple of Danish middle sized vessels trawling for Norwegian lobster.
Looking back at the Sunrise from a Danish Trawler
Personally I haven't had the pleasure of meeting that many fishermen in the flesh and I have never been onboard a trawler before. The fishermen were surprisingly nice and open about their doings, and even gave us full access to document them hoisting their trawls and sorting their catch.
Being on one of the trawlers it hit me how much these tattooed, chain smoking, slightly overweight, middle-aged men in sweat pants sitting in their plush looking command bridges looking at their monitors and digital 3D GPS integrated sonograms resembled truck drivers. Isn't that basically what they are, driving their boats slowly across the highways of the ocean dragging the bottom and hauling their cargo back to land?
To me it's like trucking but with fewer red lights and you could definitely say my romanticised preconceptions about fishermen took a little hit today. But all their niceness and openness aside, these guys are not harmless to our oceans, and there should definitely be some more red lights out there for them. They are, by their own account, throwing 50-60 per cent of what they bring up back over the side.
For them the problem is of course how to make as much money within the given system of rules as possible. They could for instance use a special sorting tool that would eliminate most of their bycatch but since it also sorts out the biggest, and most valuable, Norwegian lobsters it does not make economical sense for them to do so. And the system of quotas that they are used "forces" them to throw all the smaller but quite usable bycatch back over the side since they can get a much better profit if they just fill their quota with large fish.
They were however very friendly, and not at all unwilling to see the problems with the current system - they don't want to see the oceans completely emptied either, and were clearly open to the kinds of regulations we and the scientific community propose. As a bonus they also gave us some fabulous weather forecasts that expanded the weather window from our expected 24 hours to several days. If we can trust their weather statements - it looks like we can do a lot of good work these coming days and continue to document all this (in our campaigner Martin's words) wasteful lunacy going on.
