Hi everybody.
My name is John Paterson and I am the first Albatross Task Force Instructor to be based in Namibia. I have been tasked to work with the hake trawl fishery in Namibia and a second Instructor is to be recruited to work with the hake longline fishery.
This is all new and exciting for me as I come from a land-based conservation background where I worked as a park manager and conservation officer. For the past 11 years, I was park warden for the Skeleton Coast Park in Namibia. The move down from my last home at Moewe Bay to Walvis Bay was quite an epic with two dogs, Jacob the parrot and my wife, Barbara. We also had a whole bunch of other things as well!
Walvis is an amazing place on a huge lagoon that is a proclaimed a specially-protected Ramsar site - an important wetland for migrant birds. I really enjoy it here as I am a keen sea kayaker and this is just the best place for it. Inland of the town are huge sand dunes and the Namib desert; it's truly a place of contrast.
I am really proud and feel privileged to be part of the Albatross Task Force. The ATF team got going with a bang and a fizzle in Namibia. It all started in April where the project was launched at a public workshop on coastal and marine birds in Swakopmund.
Oli Yates came over from Chile and Meidad Goren came up from Cape Town to introduce the project at the workshop and get us going. I was soon plunged into the work with a trip to Cape Town for a training cruise with Barry Watkins and Bronwyn O'Connell aboard the I&J vessel Godetia. It was an amazing experience highlighted by my first ever encounter with a northern royal albatross - a new bird for me. Then it was back home to Namibia into a series of meetings with industry in Walvis Bay to introduce them to the project, arrange a workshop and arrange my basic sea safety course.
I then prepared a workshop for the fishing industry to give a detailed background to our project whilst I completed a five-day basic safety at sea awareness course. I got to try out a survival/immersion suit. I found this really weird as most vessels in Namibia do not have these suits on board! When we put them on and got into the heated pool, we floated about looking like a bunch of orange hippopotami!
Our workshop went ahead as scheduled and was a success despite a relatively poor turnout from the industry people. The people that attended were all really positive and keen to learn.
While there have been six trips done on long line vessels in Namibia over the last couple of years, no work has been done on trawlers. This fishery has been identified as a priority to gather data on. I am thus concentrating my efforts on the hake trawlers operating mainly out of Walvis Bay.
On 19 June, Hangana, one of the bigger fishing companies in Namibia, gave me a place aboard one of their vessels, the Fisherbank. This was an eye opening experience for me. I was blown away by the amount of birds around the fishing grounds. Two wandering albatrosses and three spectacled petrels were very welcome additions to my personal list of seabirds I've seen.
Sadly, one juvenile black-browed albatross and three white-chinned petrels were drowned during this trip. This highlights the need for us to be working here.
I was really made to feel welcome aboard the boat and all the crew and officers were very interested in my work. There is definitely an awareness of the problem and a desire to do something. This is fertile ground and hopefully we can nurture a fishing community that is really proactive towards seabird conservation.