I have just returned from a very exciting and fun-filled few days in Sedgefield and Mossel Bay. For those of you not from South Africa, these towns are located along our east coast, and apparently Mossel Bay has the second best climate in the world!
My colleague and I took a comfortable 5-hour drive down to Sedgefield, where I had offered to give a talk to the Lakes Bird Club, a member of BirdLife South Africa.
I arrived a little nervous; as this was the first public talk I was giving as an Albatross Task Force Instructor. But after meeting a few of the members, my nervousness turned to excitement.
I spoke for an hour on the work of the Task Force in South Africa to 27 members of their club, and was asked loads of questions, mostly related to my time at sea, such as 'Do you get seasick?' and 'What are conditions on the vessels like, especially for a woman?'
We thoroughly enjoyed our time at the club, letting people into our life with seabirds.
And for our next adventure
Next we drove to Mossel Bay, to begin our next adventure for the week.
Here we joined the WWF (World Wildlife Fund for Nature) team to give a two day workshop to the inshore and offshore hake trawl fishermen in the area.
We invite fishermen, government and industry to attend. The course revolves around what's called an 'Ecosystem Approach' to fisheries, highlighting issues on bycatch, pollution and ghost fishing, as well as explaining the need for responsible fisheries practices and good compliance and management of the fishery.
The inshore hake trawl fishery in South Africa is only encouraged, but not required, to use tori lines. We had good discussions around this topic and it seems that they mostly make voluntary use of them, even if it is only one tori line flown on the side the vessel is discarding. There were also lots of fun activities for everyone to get involved in.
All in all, it was a very successful course, and as always we learnt a thing or two from the fishermen as well!
The big news from Namibia is that we have now begun our research project, and flown the first ever bird-scaring tori lines on a trawler in Namibia.
This honour fell to the MFV Fisherbank belonging to Hangana, a Namibian company that has been very supportive of our work. The crew were fantastic, and really chipped in with the new challenge of deploying and retrieving the tori lines.
As hoped, the tori lines behaved well and really did what was expected - keeping birds from being struck by the warp cables.
We were at sea for 10 days, and luckily had a few days of warm, calm weather with no wind. However, that didn't last and I had to hold on tight during the days when we experienced rough five metre swells.
Unexpected visitor
On this trip I found our work does not always involve birds, when a fruit bat unexpectedly landed on the vessel. We were 80 km off-shore at the time, so quickly rescued the creature to be set free on our return to the north of Namibia where they occur.
I am really looking forward to my next trip that starts next week, so we can carry on this fantasic work saving albatrosses.
Tori lines (or bird-scaring lines) are one of the measures most commonly used to reduce seabirds from being accidentally killed by longline vessels.
In previous years we have undertaken trips on Uruguayan longline vessels to get crews to use them. Unfortunately, we've found that some tori lines can become entangled with the fishing gear when the fishing lines are set. They can also cause delays in the fishing operation – hence why they've not been well received by crews.
This year, we've been asking our fellow Albatross Task Force crews working in other countries to come up with a solution. And we think the Brazil team have come up with something....
During my last trip in May we tested their design on a fisheries research cruise with the rest of the Uruguayan Task Force team. We were able to make some modifications throughout the trip, and now seabirds are can't access the baited hooks as the longline is set.
These modifications improved the performance of the tori line, and the results were a double positive as there were fewer entanglements with the fishing gear.
We are now preparing further sea trips where we will use the tori lines on vessels from the Uruguayan commercial fleet., and test the tori lines success at reducing the capture of albatross and petrels..