After a 14 hour bus journey from my home, I arrived to Puerto Madryn harbor in Chubut province. This city is very famous because is close to Peninsula Valdez. Every spring more than 600 southern right whales arrive to give birth and breed.
After making several administrative arrangements, I boarded the Pescargen IV, a 64-metre freezer trawler with a crew of 39. Most of the crew is from Argentina but some of the officers are from Spain and Portugal. The Argentine hake is the main target species for this fleet but they can process also Patagonian grenadier, banded whiptail, Patagonian toothfish, pink cusk-eel, rays and squid.
On 26 October, a day and a half after I left Madryn, we set sail to the south waters under the charge of the captain Oscar Melchiori with great experience in Argentine and Antarctic waters. The fishing activities began after a day of navigation to the south, but the final objective of the fishing trip was the waters near to Tierra del Fuego province, the 'the land of the end of the world'.
I needed one day to find a safe place to work and to adjust the protocol to the vessel's routine. The stern of this kind of trawl vessels are damp, dirty, rusty and dangerous and have different characteristics in every one. So, is very important spend some hours to make a good election of place. I decided to use a platform on top of the stern after several consultations to the captain and sailors. This place was clean and safe although too exposed to the strong winds that would punish me over the coming days.
My activities in this trip were to count birds during the fishing activities, record the mortality in nets and impacts against the trawl cables like on the past trips. Our expectations were to find strong interactions with the cables due to the presence of fish offal discarded by the vessel and less interactions with the nets due to the short amount of time utilized in hauling. If we found lethal collisions with the trawl cable, I was to start experimenting with tori lines to avoid negative impacts.
Black-browed, royal and wandering albatrosses, southern and northern giant petrels could be observed during the seabird counts. The southern giant petrel has dark plumage as juveniles and it becomes lighter during the following years. An onboard observer can see more than 10 different plumages when recording a flock of this species on the southern ocean. A beautiful sight!
This is a good photo of a dead albatross as it shows exactly how the birds get brought to the surface - in this case it was trapped on the trawl door chains, which would have been at a depth of about 200m. That means the bird was dragged down 200 m before being entangled! Most of them get washed off by the current and we never get to record them...
The birds are attracted with the 'promise of easy food' by the freezer trawler because they discard offal and heads of the processed fish. A black-browed albatross was killed when its wings became entangled around the trawl cables during the second day. On following days I could observe more of this kind of interactions. It's very difficult to recover the body of the entangled specimens because the force, the current and the trawl are very hard in these waters.
During the following days, we went to the southern waters near to the 'Estrecho de Magallanes'/Magellan Strait. The seabird flocks in this zone include a big proportion of cape petrels. More than 600 can be seen in every haul.
After one week of fishing activity, the weather reminds us that we were in dangerous waters. Wind of more than 80 km/h, waves of seven metres height determine less hours of fishing. Still worse, the traditional Argentine barbecue of Sundays was made in the oven! Something really unacceptable in a ship with majority of Argentine people!