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: