An illegal fishing ship whose captain is rumoured to have been murdered has thrown plans for the World Surfing Championship in Bali into chaos by running aground on the island’s best surf break and it turns out to be the longliner (Ho Tsai Fa 18) - which we recently confronted in the Pacific Commons not once but twice .
Today Greenpeace took action against the biggest and most devastatingly efficient tuna catching vessel in the world, the Spanish owned purse ‘super, super seiner’ (because it is so amazingly large) Albatun Tres.
After chasing the vessel for five days over 1,000 nautical miles, the Esperanza finally caught up with the Albatun Tres this morning, and caught it red-handed deploying its massive net inside a Kiribati marine area proposed for protection.
The colossal ship can net more than 3,000 tonnes of tuna in a single fishing trip - almost double the entire annual catch of some Pacific countries – however, despite this major haul and the perilously low levels of tuna stocks worldwide, its Spanish owners do not think this is enough and are looking at deploying more ships in the area. Read more »
Langi, on board our ship the Esperanza, with an update on destructive fishing in his part of the world, and what we’re doing about it.
It’s been an eventful weekend in the Pacific Ocean, with Greenpeace activists taking on longline fishermen, saving turtles and more. Dean reports from the Esperanza…
As the sun rose across the Pacific Ocean, the crew of the Esperanza were already awake and so was the crew of the Ho Tsai Fao 18, a Taiwanese longliner. We’d spotted the longliner as the light was fading the day before and stayed with her throughout the night.
We’d been on board a Taiwanese tuna longliner earlier in the expedition and filmed 12 sacks of shark fins and tails (most were small and wouldn’t have reached breeding age yet). Our research showed this vessel had a controversial shark finning past in Costa Rica, so who knew what it was doing? Read more »
From the Esperanza in the Pacific …
The Esperanza has just left Honiara in the Solomon Islands where I joined the ship so that we can keep you up to date on all of our adventures in the Pacific. I have replaced Jess, the webby from the Greenpeace USA office, who has reluctantly returned to her desk in Washington DC. If you’ve missed whatś been going on in the Pacific over the past few weeks you can check out her blog here. Read more »
Welcome to the GPNZ blog! Here we'll tell tales, cast nasturciums, talk in parables and offer opinions on stuff that it is, at least in some way related, to the work we do.
