Trawler watch. Keep these destructive forces from our waters. Hands off our Sardines!
The sardines are prepping for their annual suicide run up the east coast of Southern Africa right now.
And so will be illegal fishers. Preparing to gorge them with their huge purse seine nets and get them into a supermarket near you.
That the overall population is dwindling as rapidly as every other fishery we on earth have depleted since mechanisation, is but one reason the sardines don’t get right into Natal waters anymore.
There is another reason. Foreign and local fishing pressure. The poor sardines barely make it to Port Edward these days, as illicit, and sometimes even legal – fishing operations, suck them all up.
I have been getting offers of US$70 per tonne in my inbox?! And the season hasn’t even started yet?! By months!
Reports filter through perpetually, concerning trawlers and the like, being spotted off the Transkei Coast.
I sure expect the powers that be recognise the tourism value per sardine, and keep at chasing those trawlers right out of our waters…
What to do?
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:27/centery:-35/zoom:6 (this shows the legal ships off our coastline. So if you see a ship, you can verify it’s being and purpose. If it ain’t on the AIS maps, then it is definitely illegal, and the incident needs to be reported immediately).
Report these type of incidents to as many places as you can.
STOP PRESS: I have been advised by an official at DAFF, that there is nowhere to report suspicious shipping activity?!
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Well done on making bringing this into people´s awareness, itº´s such a sad, like so many happening all over the World´s Oceans! The short slightness of it is staggering, and like so many other Ocean resources, worth so much more alive than dead….for US$70 per tonne, WTF! Recently, on a business trip to Dubai, I heard first hand of yet another very sad story that I had known for years. How, the once brilliant recreational sail fishing in the area, which could have brought immense wealth, jobs and joy for years to come, was destroyed in a few years for chicken feed! I saw with my own eyes a thriving White Marlin fisheries on mainland Europe go to waste, again for chicken feed at €0.20 a kilo, in less than 4 years. It´s a hard battle against the unscrupulous, at all cost profit orientated commercial lobby´s, the apathy of regulating bodies, the nonsense blind the huggers and the misinformed public….however, that is no reason to stay idle!!!
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