Tree Surgeons with the 6D

What better way to explore my new camera, the Canon EOS 6D than from my own office window? Call me lazy (is it that time of year?), but this time, very little effort was required to shoot some test pictures. A gang of tree surgeons were pruning the sycamore trees right outside my house - and living on the second floor means that I was able to capture them on eye-level, although that's a good 30 feet off the ground. In any case, it made for interesting pictures, and phantastic image quality thanks to the superb 6D.

Shifting Perspectives

What more could you want on a lazy Sunday? Good light, a bit of energy and three wonderful tilt-shift lenses in the bag to experiment with. Following on from the somewhat old Tilting & Shifting, I have once again found my more playful visual side and went for a walk through London's east end.

Scotland with the G1X

After some downtime, I decided to purchase a new compact camera, the Canon G1X. In early October, we set off on a 5-day trip across scenic Scotland, with wind, rain, clouds 'n all. Given that the light was often poor, the weather unwelcoming, the sights didn't fail to excite, and neither did my nifty little new camera. The image quality I am very excited about - shot in Raw, the detail and sharpness is impressive, the dynamic range pretty good and thus the post-production requirements fairly minimal.

But enough tech talk - enjoy some of the images!

Tuna Wars

Following publication of my Indian Ocean Tuna Trail story, it is very nice to see my esteemed colleague David O'Shea's piece on the tuna story being finally aired by Australia's SBS Dateline.

If you have 15 minutes to spare, it's well worth watching.

On the Tuna Trail

Having been in the Indian Ocean on a two-month Greenpeace expedition documenting the nature of Tuna fishing, this story is difficult to tell. Although we had a well-equipped ship, radar, satellite internet, inflatable boats, and even a helicopter at our disposal, monitoring fishing activities in the vast expanse of sea is like looking for a needle in a very large haystack.

So we trace the tuna trail back to its origins. It begins in the middle of the Indian Ocean, several hundred miles north of Mauritius in the notorious ‘Reefer Triangle’, a maritime no-man's land on the unregulated high seas where fishing vessels rendezvous with reefer ships to offload their catch of Yellowfin Tuna. Here we witnessed several transhipments from Asian longliners onto the Tuna Queen, a Panama-registered reefer ship operating for Japanese interests. The hauls disappearing into the Tuna Queen's frozen hold were impressive: some fish as large as the men who caught them, and their quantity staggering. The crews on these boats, recruited from some of the poorest nations in Asia and Africa, earn a pittance compared to their catch.

Patrolling across the Indian Ocean, we encountered several fish aggregating devices (FADs). Typically built from bamboo, these netted floating pallets provide shade underneath and attract a multitude of fish. Used primarily by French and Spanish purse seine vessels, they cast their large nets around schools of fish concentrated by the FADs and then proceed to scoop everything up on board, including juvenile fish and common bycatch species such as sharks, turtles and dolphins.

Fully laden, these boats steam back to port to offload at local canneries or onto reefer vessels such as the Antilla moored in Antsiranana, Madagascar. As payment to the dock workers doing the actual offloading, the purse seine vessels dump some of the bycatch and fish damaged during the scooping on the quayside. In effect, the locals receive some of the crumbs whilst the rich pickings remain firmly in the pockets of the foreign fleet owners.

To add insult to injury, Madagascar's lagoon fishermen, working from their small outrigger ‘Pirogues’, struggle as fish prices become depressed by a lively local market that springs up during the tuna season. Their meagre catch, usually not more than a basket for a day out on the water, provides little more than the bare minimum income.

In Mauritius, we encountered similar fates. The artisanal fishermen of Black River Bay working in their little boats lament declining catch rates and disappearing fish stocks. They squarely blame the large, industrial fishing fleets operating in their waters for the demise of tuna and other species. As the Mauritian government is more interested in quick cash from the sale of unlimited fishing licences to foreign fleets than in a future for its own coastal fishermen, these guys struggle for survival. Making their discontent known, the local fishermen staged a protest at the annual Indian Ocean Tuna Commission meeting. Needless to say, it seemed to fall on deaf ears and tired eyes of the bureaucrats attending within.

Given that the tuna industry is a global multi-billion dollar enterprise, with weak to non-existent instruments for regulation, it feels like we have only scratched the surface, and this story deserves more investigation. Monitoring the Indian Ocean fishery is almost impossible and the scope for abuse through legal loopholes and corruption correspondingly high. The transshipments we have seen on the high seas are not illegal and the quantity and origin of the catch remains largely undocumented. The majority of the boats operating there are owned and operated by faraway fishing nations such as Spain, France, Taiwan, Japan and others. It is them who reap the benefits from this highly profitable ‘free-for-all’ situation at the expense of the Indian Ocean fishery and the countries it is meant to serve.

Small is Beautiful

Whilst covering the artisanal fishermen in Mauritius, the title of E.F. Schumacher's work on people-centred economics sprang to mind. For those of you not familiar with his seminal work, 'Small is Beautiful' critiques modern economic systems of mass production, where big organisations are stripping satisfaction out of work, degrading the worker to being no more than a cog in a large machine of the production line. As neither craft skill, nor the quality of human relationships is any longer important, the economic system becomes dehumanising, making decisions on the basis of profitability rather than human need.

Schumacher's core argument centres around a model of economic enterprise that put relationship, craft and environment at the heart of people's way of working. This, he argued, would enable environmental and human sustainability - a hallmark of radical 60s and early 70s political ideas.

In Mauritius, this idea can easily be seen in reality by visiting the artisanal fishermen working in their little boats up and down the coast. Small-scale fishing is one of the biblical professions that's been around since time immemorial, and is arguably the least harmful way of reaping benefits from the ocean. 

Sadly, the fishermens' story is all-too-familiar: catch rates and fish stocks are in decline, and they squarely blame the large, foreign industrial fishing fleets for their demise. As their government is more interested in quick cash from the sale of unlimited fishing licences to the purse seiner fleets than in a future for its own fishermen, these guys struggle for survival. Making their discontent known, the local fishermen escorted our ship with a small flotilla of boats to the IOTC meeting where they held a small protest. To the cynical, this may seem futile and naive, but if I try to put myself in their shoes, what else would I do?

It may seem romantically idealistic to be praising the virtues of small, but I feel these fishermen deserve our sympathy, support and a degree of protection from industrial fishing fleets.

Strictly Tuna Business

For the past two weeks, the Greenpeace ship Esperanza has been patrolling the Indian Ocean north of Mauritius. We ventured into an area known as the 'reefer triangle', a maritime no-man's land on the unregulated high seas where  fishing vessels rendezvous with reefer ships to offload their catch of Yellowfin Tuna.

We witnessed several transhipments from Taiwanese longliners onto the Tuna Queen, a Panama-registered reefer operating for Japanese interests. The hauls disappearing in the Tuna Queen's frozen hold were always impressive: some fish as large as the men who caught them, and their quantity staggering. The prices these fish will fetch at the world's tuna auctions will be in the tens of thousands each. Although the quantity of fish transferred that we managed to document are only a tiny fraction of what gets caught in the Indian Ocean, so one can only conclude that tuna is a multi-billion Dollar business. Regulation is weak, monitoring almost impossible and the scope for abuse of catch quotas correspondingly high. 

The crews of the longliners doing the fishing, however, receive only a pittance in comparison to what their catch brings in. Mostly of Indonesian, Cambodian or Vietnamese origin, these men are out at sea for at least a year before they see home again. Branding those who struggle to make ends meet as criminals seems harsh - recognising that there is a problem of overfishing and dwindling stocks however, is not.

In comparison with these fishermen, I feel lucky: after six weeks at sea, we are arriving in Mauritius, and I have three more weeks on this assignment in the Indian Ocean. More to come...

In the Indian Ocean

For the past four weeks, I have been on board the Greenpeace ship Esperanza in the Indian Ocean. We left from Colombo and made our way to the northern tip of Madagascar, skirting the high risk piracy area extending east from Somalia on the lookout for fishing activities along the way.

Now in the Mozambique channel, I am assigned to document fishing practices here - mostly by purse seine vessels originating in France or Spain, but also the odd asian longliner. Whilst the weather is a dream with temperatures of around 30 degrees and plenty of sunshine, spotting schools of tuna or boats scooping them up has proved quite hard and time-consuming. Our daily search flights with the helicopter have turned into a repetitive daily routine; time in the inflatable boats has been rare: so far, we have examined a FAD and come close to a purse seiner hauling its catch.

One can only speculate about the reasons why this part of the Indian Ocean is fairly quiet for fishing: is it overfished and are fish stocks correspondingly low, or perhaps we've been looking in the wrong areas? Only time and more data analysis will tell, so for now I'll leave you with my first impressions from this trip below:

Back to the Beach

No folks, it's not summer yet, at least not for those of us living in the northern hemisphere. Anyway, that didn't stop us from making a short trip to the north frisian island of Sylt in the North Sea.

Ok, I admit, it wasn't warm, and the sun didn't really make any appearances, but a long sandy coastline during winter also has its charms. I hope you agree.

YouTube's NextUp!

In December, I've spent two days shadowing young talent being trained in turbo-charging their video skills at the YouTube Space at Google's London HQ and on location. It was nice seeing young filmmakers, presenters and video artists collaborate with so much enthusiasm and flourishing creativity, and I'm glad I was able to look behind the scenes - and some very funky scenes they were:

The full article was published by my client BILD here.