Hello friends of the seabirds, This year has been amazing; rough seas, wonderful birds, good boat crews and a lot of positive energy within the Brazilian Albatross Task Force team. The challenges faced working onboard have been the most difficult we’ve faced so far, testing a combination of tori lines (bird-scaring lines) and line weighting placed at different distances in relation to the hook to keep fishing operations safer for seabirds. But let's start with my recent trip. As the senior ATF instructor from the Projeto Albatroz team I already know a lot of fishing captains. On a recent visit to a local fishing company, I met up with captain Daniel Vaz who has always been keen to help out, but until now circumstance had prevented us going to sea together. We talked about our current work how his crew could support our experiments.
Daniel called the deck boson over and said the following sentence and said to him: "After you and I this vessel will also be under the command of Fabiano, give him all the help he wants and make all the changes that he needs”. I was greatly honoured and at the same time felt a huge responsibility. Daniel then announced we were ready to head out to sea and as one single entity, all the fishermen took out their cell phones and called their wives.
While we steamed out to the fishing grounds we built the fishing gear for the experiment. I was left to direct the effort and we worked hard to make sure everything was ready for the first set. As we worked I explained to everyone how we would need to arrange ourselves on deck and handle the slightly different gear configurations. On the first day fishing, while I was preparing my notes I got a pleasant surprise as the crew had the tori line in the water and it was working beautifully. There were many albatrosses, shearwaters and petrels around so this was a real bonus. I asked the fishermen who had deployed the toriline and they replied immediately: 'The captain."
I went up to the bridge and he was smiling broadly and said: “At first I didn’t think that the tori line would work, but when I deployed it and saw all the albatross moving away from the stern of the boat, I was surprised to see how effective it is”.
With that comment I knew I’d found another great friend and helped one more person believe in a world where we can protect nature.