Blog: Oceans

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

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?

The North Sea, once one of the most productive in the world, is now amongst the most degraded. Oil extraction, waste dumping and chemical pollution have all taken their toll, and relentless commercial fishing has pushed some fish stocks - such as cod - to the brink of collapse.

Which is why our ship Arctic Sunrise is once again heading out into the North Sea to campaign for the urgent creation of marine reserves - national parks at sea where marine life can get some respite from commercial exploitation.

The wind has picked up a bit and it's suddenly very difficult moving around the ship - well, moving around is not difficult at all - just getting to where you want to go. I was carrying a cup of coffee and some papers and it took me almost a minute just to get up the stairs to the little office where I'm writing this. And I keep rolling away from my computer almost m ssing every ot er key stro ke.