Peter Exley, from the RSPB, had chosen to come to Cape Town for his sabbatical. He is helping me to produce an awareness brochure on conserving seabirds in the South African hake trawl fishery.
Meeting him at the airport, it was clear after several minutes of chat that he was as keen as mustard to get to sea and experience life on board a trawler and 'grip' the iconic albatross.
Barrie Rose (Irvin & Johnson) organized us a cabin on board the wet-fish vessel Aloe and the evening of 24 January saw us steaming out of Cape Town harbour and through a flock of 1,400 Sabine's gulls and a 'lifer' for Peter - a sooty shearwater.
I was continuing my work on getting tori lines to work really well. The first four days of the trip were pretty boring with kelp gulls dominating the attending birds and the true potential of the tori line was not demonstrated.
The skipper, Randy Newman, explained to Peter what all the screen monitors on the bridge were for and that the net opening was some 120 m wide, with a 2-3 m mouth opening. Emanuel, the cook, served up fresh hake and curries and we witnessed a large fleet of tuna pole vessels in the area. Albatrosses were pretty scarce and Peter gave me a tall order - to find him a wandering albatross.
On the fifth day, we moved further south and bird numbers changed dramatically. No more kelp gulls. Shy albatrosses (600) and only 25 black-broweds, 1,300 white-chinned petrels and similar numbers of sooty shearwaters were typical counts in the 200 m zone astern.
There was a small irruption of European storm-petrels and one landed on the aft deck. We photographed it and released it unharmed. These birds weigh 30 g or equivalent to the weight of a packet of crisps, as Peter put it so neatly.
Despite higher numbers of birds, interactions with the warps were minimal, due to the deployment of tori lines. These tori lines really are efficient and Emanuel was by now genuinely interested in our work, and requested seabird identification brochures for the crew mess room.
The sixth and last day was stressful for Peter as no wanderer had, or was, sighted. I did manage, however, to show him a couple of uncommon species in flesh-footed shearwater and the unmistakable spectacled petrel.
Enjoy your wandering back home Pete and next time you're over here, I shall greet you with a placard saying 'Aloe! Aloe!'