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We caught the "Albatun Tres", a Spanish-owned and flagged tuna purse seiner, deploying its net close to the Phoenix Islands of Kiribati and witnessed many tonnes of tuna being taken out of the Pacific. We laid a 25-metre floating banner reading "No Fish, No Future" across the inside of the net as it was being hauled in.
We first found the monstrous tuna catcher on 22 May and tracked it across more than 1000 nautical miles. Its crew must have noticed us when we came within visual range as they immediately steamed away at high speed.
We managed to catch up with them when they stopped to fish. As they pulled in their catch, we showed up in inflatable boats, a jet ski and helicopter in order to expose their plunderous activities to the world.
©Greenpeace/Vickers
Purse seine vessels surround schools of fish with curtain-like nets to catch tuna. A rope along the bottom of the net is pulled like a drawstring and the whole catch is hauled onboard. These vessels have increased their efficiency enormously in the last decade through a variety of technological innovations. While targeting skipjack tuna, these vessels also catch juvenile bigeye and yellowfin tuna, as we witnessed this morning. This bycatch is seriously threatening the already vulnerable stocks of bigeye and yellowfin tuna.
Foreign fishing nations, including those of the European Union (EU), are fishing unsustainably in areas where Pacific island countries depend on tuna for income and food. The Albatun Tres arrived in the Pacific from the Indian Ocean earlier this year. It is owned by the Spanish tuna company Albacora, which is part of OPAGAC, a powerful association of Spanish tuna boat owners, processors and traders.
The Western and Central Pacific tuna fishery, the world's biggest, has been subjected to intense fishing by fleets from Asia and the United States since the 1960s. With declining tuna stocks in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, the EU has gained access to this Pacific fishing ground as a reciprocal benefit for giving aid to Pacific countries. With their own waters fished out, the EU and other foreign fishing fleets including Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the US, are literally sailing across the world to take vital fish and income from people whose lives depend on it.
Greenpeace’s solutions
Our ship, Esperanza, is in Pacific highlighting overfishing. Over eight weeks, we have taken action against fishing fleets from Taiwan, Korea, the US and the Philippines.
Greenpeace is calling on the Australian Government to support the Pacific Island nations to make fishing in the region sustainable by turning some of the Pacific’s international waters into no-take marine reserves. This will allow tuna stocks and all other marine life to recover from overexploitation.
Greenpeace is also calling for a 50% cut to the fishing effort in the Pacific to ensure there is tuna left to catch in the future.
Greenpeace advocates the creation of a network of marine reserves,
protecting 40 per cent of the world's oceans, as the long-term solution
to overfishing and the recovery of our overexploited oceans.
What you can do
You can help ensure the survival of the Pacific’s tuna stocks by demanding that retailers and chefs stop stocking unsustainable tuna products such as bluefin, bigeye and yellowfin, which are now threatened in all oceans.
What you can do to stop overfishing
Tuna TV: Firsthand accounts of overfishing's impacts plus updates from the Esperanza
