We have been operating for a year now and have a made some progress on getting a handle on what is happening in the Namibian hake trawl fishery. I have not been out to sea recently, but am hoping to rectify this soon as the office becomes tedious compared to life at-sea!2009 got off to a brilliant start with a trip to Chile where I attended the first ATF International Workshop in Coquimbo in January. This was a fantastic workshop where I met up with all my South American ATF counterparts, what a wonderful dedicated bunch of people.
The workshop was a great learning experience on our work in the international arena and was really motivating. We spent a training day at-sea looking at line sink rates on a pelagic longliner and in between the experiments I got to see some super birds including a Chatham albatross and Westland petrel. Inca tern, a bird that has been long on my wish list, was ticked early one morning at the fishing harbour. Following the workshop where we looked at seabird mitigation research I now have a research project which will keep me busy for the next 10 months. I have established links with an industry partner and hope to start at sea data gathering in the near future. I have spent some serious desk time recently sorting out budgets, year plans, data entry and assisting with the WWF Responsible Fisheries training. This is a wonderful forum for engaging with fishermen to discuss the problems around incidental seabird mortalities.
The data entry work has been interesting as it is part of testing the new ATF Database which is a really cool database application developed for our needs. I think with all teams using this we will be able to have a more standard data set across all countries.
While I have been shore bound we had a slew of albatross mortalities along the beaches around Walvis. Happily these mortalities were not fishing related, but they point towards interesting birds using our Benguela system as one of the records was of a light-mantled albatross - the first record for Namibia and only the 12th for southern Africa - and a ringed juvenile Tristan albatross. 2009 looks to be a busy and interesting year!