Hello friends of the seabirds, This year has been amazing; rough seas, wonderful birds, good boat crews and a lot of positive energy within the Brazilian Albatross Task Force team. The challenges faced working onboard have been the most difficult we’ve faced so far, testing a combination of tori lines (bird-scaring lines) and line weighting placed at different distances in relation to the hook to keep fishing operations safer for seabirds. But let's start with my recent trip. As the senior ATF instructor from the Projeto Albatroz team I already know a lot of fishing captains. On a recent visit to a local fishing company, I met up with captain Daniel Vaz who has always been keen to help out, but until now circumstance had prevented us going to sea together. We talked about our current work how his crew could support our experiments.
Daniel called the deck boson over and said the following sentence and said to him: "After you and I this vessel will also be under the command of Fabiano, give him all the help he wants and make all the changes that he needs”. I was greatly honoured and at the same time felt a huge responsibility. Daniel then announced we were ready to head out to sea and as one single entity, all the fishermen took out their cell phones and called their wives.
While we steamed out to the fishing grounds we built the fishing gear for the experiment. I was left to direct the effort and we worked hard to make sure everything was ready for the first set. As we worked I explained to everyone how we would need to arrange ourselves on deck and handle the slightly different gear configurations. On the first day fishing, while I was preparing my notes I got a pleasant surprise as the crew had the tori line in the water and it was working beautifully. There were many albatrosses, shearwaters and petrels around so this was a real bonus. I asked the fishermen who had deployed the toriline and they replied immediately: 'The captain."
I went up to the bridge and he was smiling broadly and said: “At first I didn’t think that the tori line would work, but when I deployed it and saw all the albatross moving away from the stern of the boat, I was surprised to see how effective it is”.
With that comment I knew I’d found another great friend and helped one more person believe in a world where we can protect nature.
After attending the 1st World Seabird Conference in Canada in September, I got back to South Africa and headed straight out to sea. It was absolutely wonderful to be sailing out to sea under a bright full moon, although the swells were still huge after a recent cold front. We started fishing about 40 nautical miles (nm) from the coast off Cape Point. The fishing was good but the prevailing south easterly wind was due to blow more than 30km/ hour for the next three days so the skipper decided to make a run for it and head far south, almost 200 nm from shore. This is one of my favourite places on earth! No land in site and nothing but the sea, sun, fish and the birds!
The fishing was very good in this area, and the birds were awesome! In just one day I spotted three Wandering albatrosses (one with only slight white patches on the wings; an older very white one with much less black/ brown on the wings and an immature [darker] one), a northern Royal albatross, some black-bellied storm petrels and a Buller’s albatross! The sighting of the Buller’s albatross was only the 5th off South Africa, as I found out later when chatting to the rest of the ATF team. I also saw my 1st ever flesh-footed shearwater which was very exciting for me.
Another rather interesting thing that happened on the second last fishing day was that we pulled up and enormous whale skull in the net. Having assisted with whale dissections before I know what a dead whale smells like (they have a very distinct smell) and I could smell the skull before I even knew it was onboard! I couldn’t understand where the smell was coming from (looking out over the sea at the very back of the ship), until I found this massive skull, still all bloody (but completely without flesh) lying on the deck.
I asked the skipper if we could possibly keep the skull for a friend of mine who is involved with whale and dolphin research and would really appreciate it, but he said unfortunately not. A pity, but on second thoughts, I am really glad he said no as I don’t know if we would have been able to live for three days with that overpowering smell onboard! I did take a few photographs of the skull while it was onboard and showed these to my friend. She and her boss have decided that it could possibly be a humpback whale skull. So the question remains, “what happened to the whale?”