It has been an emotional winter, with two sensational sea trips. I have so much information I don’t know where to start; attacks from a group of killer whales (orcas), arrivals of turtles, albatrosses and fantastic fishes plus all the great stories from the fishermen!
I’ll start with the captain, Jorge Cabeção, better known as the legendary Jorge Bighead, who has been working at sea since 1970. Jorge explained on the last trip how he had seen so many seabirds caught over the years, and that the large wandering albatross were no exception. “These days”, he said, “we don’t see so many and only during the winter period.”
Jorge Bighead has been supporting our Projeto Albatroz initiative in Brazil by speaking with the other captains over the radio while we are at sea. He speaks of the application of mitigation measures, explaining to others the work we are doing during the trip and the importance of helping us demonstrate this to more members of the fleet.
During one of these discussions I had the chance of chatting with a couple of Portuguese vessels that were fishing in international waters, each setting over 70 nautical miles of hooks per day. The captains explained that they didn’t know about seabird mitigation in fisheries, so we invited them to speak with ATF instructors from Brazil, Uruguay or Argentina when they stop in one of our ports for supplies.
Continuing our discussions with Jorge Bighead, we spent time looking at tori line installation options and fitted his vessel with a device that helps deploy and retrieve the tori line more swiftly. It was really practical for use at-sea and, happily, we had no problems with seabirds during the trip! The issues were due more to the orcas. Two groups attacked fishing lines on three separate occasions. Five individuals managed to strip lots of tuna and swordfish from the line, ruining an entire days fishing.
Other captains commented that the area between Uruguay and Brazil is known for this group of fantastic animals, stating that they had become expert fishers! The natural environment has responded in various ways to human fishing, becoming more difficult by the day. The captains are interested to hear what we think about the situation and there is always a lot of discussion onboard. We need to give natural systems some time to reproduce without pressure, but we do not give any time for species and populations to recuperate.