Originally published 2016-04-29.
Between December 2014 and April 2015, the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd ran Operation Icefish, a campaign against six notorious fishing vessels nicknamed the "Bandit Six". These ships had spent roughly a decade illegally catching Patagonian toothfish in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. The campaign's most famous moment was a 110-day pursuit of the Thunder, the longest chase of a poaching vessel on record, which ended when the ship sank off West Africa and its officers were later convicted.
Headlines at the time claimed Sea Shepherd had "ended" illegal fishing in Antarctica. That goes too far. What the group and several governments did was put the most wanted toothfish poaching fleet out of business, which is a real and rare achievement on the high seas.
Who the "Bandit Six" were
The Bandit Six were a group of six vessels blacklisted for illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing in Antarctic waters managed by CCAMLR, the international commission that oversees fishing in the Southern Ocean. Interpol later said the fleet appeared to operate through shell companies linked to a Spanish firm, Vidal Armadores.
The ships were hard to catch because they kept changing their identities. The Thunder alone had sailed under at least half a dozen names, among them Rubin, Typhoon I, Kuko and Wuhan N4, and had flown flags of convenience from several countries. By the time it sank, Nigeria had removed it from its register. A vessel with no real flag and a new name every season is very difficult for any single government to prosecute.
Interpol issued a notice for the Thunder in April 2013, and Malaysian officials stopped it in May 2014, releasing it after a fine of about $90,000 was paid. It went straight back to fishing.
Why toothfish poaching matters
Patagonian toothfish is a large, slow, deep-water fish that can live for up to 50 years and exceed 100 kilograms. It is sold in restaurants as "Chilean sea bass", a marketing name coined by a U.S. wholesaler in 1977. Its high price made it a magnet for poachers in the 1990s: illegal catches peaked at an estimated 32,000 tonnes in 1997.
Long-lived fish that mature late cannot bounce back quickly from overfishing, so unrecorded catches undermine the quotas scientists set for the legal fishery. The Bandit Six also used gillnets, which are banned in CCAMLR waters. These walls of mesh are left to drift or hang in the water and catch almost anything that swims into them, including sharks, rays, seabirds and marine mammals, a problem known as bycatch.
The 110-day chase of the Thunder
Sea Shepherd's ship Bob Barker found the Thunder on 17 December 2014, inside the CCAMLR area, as it was setting illegal gillnets. The Thunder fled, and the Bob Barker followed. A second Sea Shepherd vessel, the Sam Simon, later joined the pursuit and hauled up kilometres of abandoned net. Sea Shepherd reported recovering about 72 kilometres of illegal gillnet during the campaign.
The chase crossed the Southern, Indian and Atlantic Oceans, roughly 10,000 nautical miles in all, and lasted 110 days. The previous record was a 21-day pursuit in 2003, when an Australian patrol ship chased the toothfish poacher Viarsa 1.
On 6 April 2015 the Thunder sank in the waters of São Tomé and Príncipe, off West Africa. Sea Shepherd did not sink it. The evidence pointed to the ship's own captain scuttling it, apparently to destroy evidence, while Sea Shepherd crews picked up the 40 people on board and, by their own account, boarded to gather evidence before it went down.
What happened in court and to the rest of the fleet
The Thunder's crew of 40, made up of 30 Indonesians and 10 officers from Spain, Chile and Portugal, were handed to the authorities of São Tomé and Príncipe. Three officers were convicted of illegal fishing offences: captain Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo of Chile received three years, chief engineer Agustín Dosil Rey two years and nine months, and second mechanic Luis Miguel Pérez Fernández two years and eight months. Together they were fined more than $17 million.
The other ships fared little better. By April 2016, according to reports at the time, another vessel of the group had been sunk by the Indonesian navy in March 2016 after it was seized, and the remaining four were detained in various ports. For a fleet that had operated for about ten years, that was a remarkable reversal in little more than a year.
Sea Shepherd's Siddharth Chakravarty said the group would keep sending ships until nations agreed on "firm enforcement regimes on the high seas".
Did this end illegal fishing in Antarctica?
No, and the record shows why the claim needs care. Illegal toothfish catches had already fallen by more than 95 per cent from their 1997 peak by around 2010, thanks to steady work by CCAMLR and member governments: vessel licensing, satellite tracking, port inspections, blacklists of IUU ships and a catch documentation scheme that follows each toothfish from landing to sale. Operation Icefish removed the last well-known poaching fleet, which was a major blow, but it built on years of quieter enforcement.
It also depended on governments. Sea Shepherd can follow, document and publicise, but arrests, trials and sinkings were carried out by states such as São Tomé and Príncipe and Indonesia, with Interpol co-ordinating. The success is best understood as a partnership between activists, police and fisheries regulators.
How to support legal, sustainable fishing
- Check the label. More than half of legally caught toothfish comes from fisheries certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, such as South Georgia and the Ross Sea.
- Ask where it came from. Restaurants and fishmongers selling "Chilean sea bass" should be able to tell you the fishery or certification.
- Back enforcement, not just protest. Port inspections and international agreements are what close markets to stolen fish.
Sea Shepherd itself was founded by Paul Watson in 1977 and has always been controversial for its confrontational tactics. Whatever one thinks of those methods, the Thunder chase is one of the clearest cases where persistence at sea led to convictions on land.
Sources: Wikipedia: FV Thunder; Wikipedia: Patagonian toothfish; Wikipedia: Sea Shepherd Conservation Society; One Green Planet, April 2016; Sea Shepherd; original story via True Activist.
COMMENTS