Hello friends of seabirds.
At this time of the year it is very dangerous to sail here in the South Atlantic. To make you know how bad it is to navigate, when the FV Oceano Brasil reached the fishing area, and we started to fish, the wind changed its direction. So, we did the hauling facing a sea with Force 7 (Beaufort Scale) with huge waves.
During three days, the boat was drifting. During this time, we couldn't do anything else so I took the opportunity to talk with the fishermen about the seabirds conservation. I did some lectures about the geographic aspects, because most of the time the crew had some difficulties to understand the origin of these seabirds. I reinforced the names of Tristan da Cunha, South Georgia and Falklands/Malvinas, places where the seabirds came from.
At the third day, finally the weather became better. At 8 pm, the skipper ordered the crew to prepare to set the baits. He consulted me about how best to use the bird-scaring tori line, so we did a test before the setting and we felt that it would be very difficult because of the wind.
In theory, we thought that it wouldn't have any seabird capture during that night, but next day, for my shock and the skipper's also, there was a significant capture.
At the next set, we used the blue-dyed bait (so the seabirds cannot see the bait) and installed the tori lines. The skipper decided to test the efficiency of the dyed bait, so we baited half the longline with blue-dyed bait and the other half the normal way. Despite this, there were still captures! But importantly, the birds were captured only on hooks with natural baits and in lower numbers.
In order to convince the skipper about the efficiency of using seabird mitigation methods, the best way was to look at how many fish were caught.
In a sequence of several settings with blue-dyed bait and tori lines we could observe a good temper in the skipper. This happened mainly because most of fish were caught on the hooks with the dyed baits. And the biggest one! The best result was that the amount of fish caught did not suffer because we were using seabird protection methods.
Later on, I spoke with the skipper, and according with this own words, he believes that the use of a tori line guarantees 95% of no seabird capture and the use of blue-dyed bait together, with tori lines, is a very efficient measure which can ensure a better fishing productivity.
After the skipper saw the good fishery capture, he ordered his crew to adopt a new routine: to bait the squids in blue dye and use the tori line. We came back very happy because of two reasons: we accomplished a good fishery and each crew member felt their own environmental and social responsibilities to our planet.