Hi everyone,
It has been a very busy winter here in Cape Town with lots of rain and cold weather, but summer is coming, along with some changes.
We have moved to a new office close to the harbour - a major upgrade, and it makes life so much easier when the boats are round the corner. Thanks to Cape Bird Club for all their help.
On a personal level, the winter saw me attending the International Albatrosses and Petrels Conference held in Cape Town. The conference was excellent and beside the great talks, it was a good opportunity to meet a lot of our partners from all over the world and get reacquainted with some old friends as well.
Winter is also peak season for seabirds with huge numbers coming to forage in our waters. As a result, bycatch rates are usually very high.
With the new permit conditions limiting the allowed bird mortalities per longline vessel to 25 birds I was very interested to follow the action and see how it affects the fishing operation and bycatch levels. And with observers on most of the longliners we pretty much know what is going on all over this fleet.
It is very encouraging to see that compliance with mitigation regulations has improved big time, especially with tori lines now used at almost 100% of the sets!! It was also really pleasing to find out that the bycatch level is almost 10 times lower than for the same time last year. This is really great news for us.
In between all that I managed to go to sea on two different boats; the first was a trawler where I collected some data for Barry and Bronwyn. It was my first trawl trip - I usually work with longliners - and it was a very interesting trip.
The second was a very special trip. We were trying out new weighting leads which will increase the sinking rate while reducing risk of injury for the crew. By increasing the hook sinking rate we decrease the time the bait is available for the birds to steal it and get hooked.
Very rough weather conditions and poor fishing shortened this trip, but the crew loved the idea of these 'safe leads' and next week I'm going with them again to continue the experiment. I will tell you all about it when I'm back. We also built different kinds of tori lines and tried them out.
As most of the crew know me from last year's trip, it was a very joyful reunion and working together was great fun.