Three months ago, I boarded a Sea Shepherd ship, the Sea Eagle, in Paola, Calabria, in southern Italy.

Sea Shepherd Global is an NGO that protects wildlife and combats illegal fishing in direct-action campaigns around the world. You might have heard of them as the good pirates of the sea. Today its fleet, also known as Neptune’s Navy, is made up of eight refurbished fishing vessels a one custom-built ship, each one is crewed by volunteers that share a deep love for the ocean and defending its voiceless creatures.

I had traveled by train from Florence and by the time I made it to the ship it was nightfall,  past dinner time. Most of the crew was already asleep but the First Officer, Yuval Elroy, had stayed awake to greet me and offer me some delicious vegan food. As I ate, we got to know one another, and towards the end of our conversation, I asked Yuval what was the plan for the following day?

“Removing longlines from dawn ‘til dusk.”

For the last six years Sea Eagle’s Operation Siso has been focused on removing abandoned or illegal longlines, octopus traps and FADs (fish aggregating devices) from the Mediterranean. Since its inception the campaign has decreased illegal fishing in Calabria by 70 percent. When I boarded the crew was searching for longlines, a very harmful method of fishing, where floating nylon lines connect a buoy to the seabed with several hooks and baits attached to it. Once attached fishers go and check, every once in a while, to see whether a swordfish has taken the bait. About 300,000km of abandoned longlines are currently floating in the Mediterranean, which is the same distance between the Earth and the Moon. As a result, the population of swordfish in the Med has decreased by 90 percent. Every day, the deck crew on board the Sea Eagle work tirelessly to remove thousands of abandoned longlines that, despite not being in use, still catch hundreds of marine wildlife as bycatch.

The following morning, the core team met at 7:30am on the bridge where the Captain suggested the plan for the day as well as locations of possible abandoned longlines, then everyone flocked to the dining room to share a nutritious vegan breakfast. Apart from the core team, everyone else onboard are volunteers — from the oiler to the deckhands, the cook and the photographers — exchanging their time and work for food, shelter and an experience out at sea. After breakfast, everyone dissipated to their respective work areas and the day began. It felt as though every crew member has an important role to play to keep the ship afloat and its community safe and healthy, just like a buzzing hive, where each working bee is aware of where they have to be and what they have to do to ensure smooth sailing.

We set sail in search of longlines. Once we anchored, I joined the deckhands pulling longlines out of the water on the bow. Finally, I had a longline in my hands, actually touching what had been an abstract fishing method until now. Only twenty minutes into pulling, we found a dead swordfish.

There’s a conceptual dilemma in ocean conservation that is referred to as the “out of sight, out of mind” problem. Arguably, only a tiny fraction of the world’s population has a direct relationship with the ocean and an even smaller number has actually spent time out at sea. This is exactly why the fishing industry — which now numbers over four million vessels — can get away with destructive methods of fishing: nobody sees what they’re up to, except for the volunteers of Neptune’s Navy.

After spending the morning working on the deck, I approached Yuval and asked her about her experience in several Sea Shepherd ships. Over the past six years, she has worked with Sea Shepherd in almost every ocean: the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, the Southern Ocean of Antarctica, the Atlantic near West Africa, the Pacific near Latin America, and the tranquil blue Seas of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. I asked her what have been the most intense operations she has worked on?

“When I was working on the campaign in Peru, all the time I kept thinking this is so far away from the public eye, I can’t believe that I’m witnessing this brutality. I couldn’t believe the amount of fishing vessels, probably more than many other countries combined. In Peru fishers are mostly looking for tuna. I remember being on watch and at some point our radar was packed with vessels coming in and out to sea, at least a few times a day. Each time they were probably taking between 200 to 300 tonnes of fish. That coast has a huge population of seals, and of course they were attracted to the tuna the fishers were catching, and they just kept coming in until there were thousands of them, and they were constantly getting caught in those nets. I remember looking with the binoculars and watching them trying to escape from the fishing nets, their heads popping out of the water under the black nets, trying to find a way out that they will never find, because that’s it, it’s over. And all of this is just because the fishing industry gets away with killing thousands of other animals as bycatch. Few people realise how much damage they’re truly causing.”

Bycatch is a term used to describe animals that are not intended to be caught by that fishing operation. An estimated 300,000 cetaceans and 500,000 turtles are killed each year in unintentional entanglements, but the real number is probably higher.

Where else did you see a lot of bycatch? I asked.

“While in Mexico during Operation Milagro, patrolling the Sea of Cortez, when we were out spotting gillnets.”

Gillnets are another destructive method of fishing, they look like floating curtains that are anchored to the seabed and attached to buoys on the surface. They entangle anything that tries to swim through it, from small juvenile fish to whales.

“Those nets were full of marine life, as the Sea of Cortez is known to be as the aquarium of the world. It is just so rich, it’s teeming with life. Every night that we were pulling in nets we found tens of caught marine animals. Sometimes we would pull those nets and we could tell that those carcasses had been there for a long time. Probably the fishers took what they needed, which was the bladder of the totoaba, and just left. It’s frustrating because they don’t clean up after, it shouldn’t be the end for more animals, but the nets become ghost nets and keep killing. Every day we pulled between 10-14 nets. When we’d find a dead animal we’d put the carcass in a tarp in the bow of the ship. I remember one day that tarp had about 20 stingrays.”

In Chinese medicine, the swim bladder of the totoaba fish is thought to cure ailments. Due to overfishing the totoaba can’t be found anymore in Chinese waters, increasing the price of one bladder to nearly $20,000 – $80,000 per kg. In Mexico, the intense fishing of the totoaba with gillnets has caused the quick decline of the world’s smallest cetacean, the vaquita.

Technically, since 2017, the use of gillnets has been banned in Baja California in an effort to save the elusive vaquita porpoise. However, laws out at sea are hard to enforce, which is why Sea Shepherd works with local authorities to support the enforcement of fishing regulations and apprehend illegal fishers. Sea Shepherd’s presence in Mexico has encouraged more regulation in the sector, as they have provided strong evidence against destructive forms of fishing. Last October, Sea Shepherd managed to secure an agreement with the Mexican government to help expand the protection area for the vaquita porpoise and therefore expand the area where they can patrol and operate. I asked Yuval, where else has Sea Shepherd successfully worked with local law enforcement?

“In West Africa we collaborated quite closely with the local governments: we provide the ship, the crew, the fuel, and the country will provide the local authorities to make all the required inspections and investigations that are needed to tackle and eventually apprehend illegal fishing operations in the water. With each operation we are showing the area that illegal fishing is not tolerated, giving the fish and the animals and the ocean the opportunity to thrive again.”

So what happens when you find an illegal fishing vessel?

“When we find a ship suspected of illegal activity, we board with the local authorities to begin the inspection. Usually our field medic will also join as workers’ conditions on these ships are horrible, they lack basic safety gear and hygiene. So the first thing our medic does is to treat wounds, infections and cuts — many fishers are not even allowed to leave the ships, there’s a lot of forced labour out at sea, essentially modern day slavery. Then our media team joins us to capture footage as evidence of what is happening onboard. What is really shocking to witness is how much bycatch is caught in these fishing vessels that just goes to waste. For example, we’ve found shrimp boats that throw away 90 percent of their catch, hundreds of fish and marine life are just thrown overboard, it makes no sense.”

Shrimp trawlers are notorious for having the worst bycatch ratio, the standard amount is shocking: for every pound of shrimp caught, six pounds of bycatch is thrown overboard, including sharks, turtles and rays. In September 2021, during Sea Shepherd’s Operation Albacore, a trawler was arrested in Gabon that had an even worse ratio of 0.2% shrimp to 99.8% bycatch. Gabon’s Minister of Fisheries Maganga-Moussavou was present during the arrest and was completely dumbfounded by the waste:

“It was important for me to see firsthand the impact of the shrimp fishery off Gabon’s coast. These wasteful practices cannot be tolerated in Gabon. I have commissioned an official inquiry into the shrimp fishery and pending the outcome of the investigation, I am prepared to suspend the fishing season until a solution can be found to the bycatch problem.”

Yet 65 percent of the world’s seas don’t fall under any jurisdiction, the high seas or Antarctica are no man’s land, places where Sea Shepherd can’t apprehend vessels with local authorities. In those areas their strategy is different. Last winter, Neptune’s Navy’s newest addition, the Allankay, headed to the Southern Ocean for Operation Antarctica Defense to document the fishing industry’s furthest endeavour, supertrawlers catching krill. Yuval was onboard.

“There are several supertrawlers that are out there looking for krill, and one of the biggest challenges in Antarctica is that this is perfectly legal, because they are licensed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). So the best thing we can do is to go down there and just do a lot of documentation and show the world what happens when they choose to consume krill.”

In the last five years, krill fishing has increased five times. Krill are vital for the survival of the Antarctic ecosystem. As a keystone species they are the main source of food for whales and penguins. In early 2023, the Bob Brown Foundation joined the Sea Shepherd’s Antarctica campaign to dive deeper into this topic. Their research shows that one supertrawler catches around 50 tonnes of krill per day, that’s enough to feed 30 whales.

“Mainly, krill is used for the colouring of salmon in fish farms or it’s used for omega 3 supplements. I think few people are realising how much this industry is decimating Antarctica’s marine life. This is a marine area that is so rich with life, whales, seals, truly the last wilderness on Earth. Yet these supertrawlers are huge, huge floating factories, and they are literally taking food away from those animals’ mouths.”

Technically, the CCAMLR is also supposed to protect Antarctica’s wildlife and nature. Last year, the krill industry was directly lobbying CCAMLR in an effort to increase their yearly catch allowance. Thanks to the Bob Brown Foundation’s report and Sea Shepherd documentation of Antarctica’s destruction, the CCAMLR rejected the krill industry’s request, a win for the whales and the world.

It was another success for the replicable system that Sea Shepherd has created, which can actually protect the ocean from its worst enemy: industrial fishing. Sea Shepherd’s campaigns support local law enforcement, encourage more regulation, deter illegal fishing activities all while showing the world what is happening out of sight and out of mind on the High Seas. One could say that they’re the much needed eyes watching our oceans. This has made Yuval, along with the rest of Neptune’s Navy, a key witness of the fishing industry’s shady and murky business: from slavery, to absurd amounts of bycatch and destructive and senseless methods of fishing in giant floating factories. The sad reality of how the fishing industry operates is miles away from their idealistic marketing image of a fisherman with his rod.

Thanks to this passionate and global community of volunteers, the oceans and its creatures finally have some protection. After four days, I disembarked the Sea Eagle with a heart full of hope and admiration for this floating crew of dedicated activists.

Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

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“I studied to be a technician to solve technical issues, like changing the type of fishing nets that were being used… Nobody had taught me how to understand a culture, how to engage with the community, how to appreciate how they feel and how they live, not just by understanding their language, but all of their expressions. This realization made me grow a lot and see conservation work in an entirely different light.”

I met Alejandro Robles on a sunny afternoon in his countryside home in San Bartolo, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Alejandro and his wife Monica grow their own produce there and have built nature cabins for guests. Their home was welcoming and peaceful, a sweet countryside relief nestled within the giant cacti that are so symbolic of Baja. They normally reside in La Paz, the capital of Baja California Sur. Baja is known for its marine wildlife and ecosystems, it’s often described as an “open air aquarium”.

Alejandro has been working in ocean conservation his entire life. At the tender age of 26 he was on the scientific boat that had one of the first sightings of the vaquita marina in the wild —– the elusive endangered and tiny porpoise that is endemic to the Sea of Cortez. 

“The totoaba is a huge endemic fish in danger of extinction and looking for it I ran into the vaquitas. So, I was part of a marine mammal scientific team and I collected the first fresh specimens of the vaquitas back in 1985. Until then the vaquita was virtually unknown, they only knew it existed because of a skull that had been found in 1955, upon which the new species was classified in 1958.”

He then focused on the sustainable management of fisheries, administering the sardine and anchovy fisheries at the national level in Mexico — the basis of the ocean’s food system.

“I was in charge of negotiating the first sardine fishing bans and to stop all juvenile fish catches. That’s when Conservation International arrived in the region and hired me in ‘88 to run The Sea of Cortez program. They were interested in birds and in the islands of the Gulf and sardines were their main food source and I understood what was happening with sardines. Eventually I became their Mexico director working on the protection of the Lacandon tropical rainforest in Chiapas and also in Oaxaca.”

A few years after that, in 2000, Alejandro became Vice President for Mexico and Central America Conservation International (CI) based in their Washington DC headquarters.

“After some years as Vice President of CI in the US, I moved to to San Diego to start Noreste Sustentable (NOS), and in 2008 my wife and I decided to move back to Mexico. We chose to settle in La Paz in Baja California.”

Upon his return to Mexico, Alejandro founded Noreste Sustentable (NOS), an NGO that sought to combat illegal fishing and to protect the vaquita marina.

“In the north of the Gulf, in the towns of Santa Clara and San Felipe, the vaquita was disappearing. So, we started working with the national government to establish a vaquita refuge inside the already established marine reserve and to make certain gill nets illegal. However, I eventually realized that the technical solutions don’t really work if the social fabric of the community is sick. The towns in the north were rampant with drugs, trafficking and illegal fishing.  But as environmental NGOs we are not really able to deal with social issues, so we just pretended they didn’t exist and kept lobbying the government to create a marine reserve, but in truth, the society needed help.

“Whilst we were working to create a marine area in the north we also established a citizen watch group against illegal fishing in La Paz. We would show up to the illegal boats and essentially do the police’s work. One day the Marine Admiral noticed our work and told us to call him next time we saw illegal shrimp boats, he promised to send help and intercept the boats. So we did, and he kept his promise. The shrimp boat didn’t even have any licenses and the next day news traveled fast around the bay that illegal shrimping wasn’t tolerated any longer. The illegal shrimp fishing boats stopped after that. And once they stopped we began looking into the local fishermen who had a tendency to fish with harpoons at night, an illegal method of fishing.”

When Alejandro had relocated to La Paz, he leased the NOS office space in an area known as el Manglito, a notoriously difficult community, one of the most violent in La Paz. He found it hard to assimilate into the community, so a neighbour advised him to hire Alicia, a loved local that knew everyone in the neighborhood.

“One day, Alicia was in the office. It was quite funny looking back on it, because we were checking night photographs from the illegal fishing observatory. The photos revealed faces despite the darkness. So we’re all checking the images when Alicia walks in and asks: ‘What is this? Why did you take these photographs?’ I replied, ‘we’re just checking photos of fishermen fishing illegally.’ ‘But it’s my cousin! What does this NGO do exactly?’ I responded that ‘we try to stop illegal fishing.’ Alicia then shouted ‘but everyone in this neighborhood is involved in illegal fishing!’. Unknowingly I had rented an office in the heart of La Paz’s illegal fishing community. For a year we remained in this very tense situation, where the local community didn’t want anything to do with us.

“Then something interesting happened, Alicia’s 20 year old son Omar asked me to help him with his football team. Of course I agreed and told the team I would help if they agreed to fair play rules and to give back to the community in some way or another. They agreed to the conditions and I helped them buy their kits and set up team rules. At the same time my wife and I kept insisting on finding a way to connect with the community, nobody would even say hello back to us. But then, one day, walking around the area we started picking up litter that was on the streets, and everyone started to notice. Without saying anything, they started picking up trash too and giving it to us when we walked by, and this is how our first interactions began. People would show up and say ‘we noticed you like picking up trash, so we collected some for you’. Then, Cano, the captain of the football team came up to me and said ‘you helped us, now we want to help. We want to organize a neighborhood clean up.’ 

Morre than 50 people showed up to that first clean up. They collected 20 tonnes of garbage and even turned a landfill into a football field. 

“This day changed the energy completely. Eventually, we cleaned up the whole neighborhood, organising six clean up days. Once the garbage was dealt with, the group started washing off the graffitis from the walls too. It was almost as though the process had to start on land first to eventually reach the shores. 

“Then about a year later, in 2010, we placed the first denunciations of two local illegal fishermen Huber and Guillermo… But by then some people in the community trusted us and encouraged Guillermo and Hubert to come talk to us. So the first discussions began. Back then I was figuring out how to engage in a healthy dialogue to create a shared vision. You know it’s difficult because we didn’t really know how to achieve that dialogue.” 

By 2011, Guillermo and Hubert, along with NOS, led the project to recuperate the Catarina clam in the La Paz inlet. The Catarina clam became functionally extinct in the area and had to be brought over from neighbouring coastal lagoons.

“Together, we brought the Catarina clam from Concepcion bay and reproduced them in a lab. That year we planted the first 25,000 clams. Months after we planted them, once they had reached their commercial size, they were all stolen. The theft was in defiance to the project, because they were just thrown away. Interestingly, this really peeved off the local community. Everyone was shocked. ‘This can’t be possible, that was a good project,’ they’d say in the streets.

After the theft, six more fishermen joined Guillermo and Hubert. 

“‘We want to join the project too,’ they said. Within a year, instead of 25,000 clams they planted over 500,000, however, again the clams were stolen, but each time there was a robbery, the community would respond more aggressively and more people would want to get involved.”

Five days after meeting Alejandro, I drove to La Paz to meet Hubert at the NOS offices in el Manglito. Huber proudly introduced himself as an ex-illegal fisherman and gave me a wonderful tour of the regenerated area aboard his panga (a traditional Mexican fishing boat). Throughout the tour, Huber opened up about his journey. I could feel his pride and joy as he explained the arduous underwater work.

“For years the community overfished, and the area became overexploited. When my father fished he could take out 40kg of Catarina clams in an hour, whereas I would spend all day trying to find only 1kg. Eventually we tried to look for work elsewhere, going around the whole of Baja fishing illegally. We would be chased by the local coast guards, and we felt like the worst delinquents in the world, but all we really wanted was to survive. Nobody was teaching us how to fish in the best possible way, that was all we knew. We would harpoon at night and the citizen watch group would chase us away. Now the same people that chased us are our friends.

“Initially we thought NOS was out to fuck us. But eventually we realised they weren’t as bad as we thought. We didn’t trust Alejandro at all at the beginning, and he didn’t trust us either, but then the idea was born to recuperate the clams in the bay, and manage it well, and take care of them. So NOS helped us get all of the permits and do an overview of the restoration area. Together we regenerated the whole of the Ensenada area. A few years after the project began, even the turtles and the dolphins came back to the bay.”

The Bay of La Paz is a heavily trafficked shipping area where most of Baja’s resources arrive. La Paz also has a big thermoelectric plant. So it was a truly refreshing experience to witness clean waters, healthy mangroves and plenty of seabirds just a five minute panga ride from the city’s port. 

“In 2012, working with NOS, we agreed to stop fishing the pen shell clam in the bay for some years. By 2015, instead of 40,000 clams that we planted, we had 5 million. But then an invasive sponge-like species killed most of our pen shells. That taught us to diversify. So we requested permits to plant several species of clams, establish a sustainable aquaculture of oysters, and also regenerate the mangrove. Today we don’t even mind losing 70% of our clams to birds, because a scientific expert told us that it means that the ecosystem is healthy.”

The Bay of La Paz was dredged in the 1980s to enable ships to dock at the port. The dredging, along with overfishing, caused the slow demise of La Paz’s marine ecosystem, leading fishermen to take desperate measures to feed their families. Today, Huber and Guillermo teach other fishermen in Mexico how to relocate and regenerate clam populations. Recently, Huber’s daughter joined the project, offering tours of the regenerated mangroves as part of a sustainable tourism initiative. 

When speaking with Alejandro, he explained the simple act that inspired this transformation. 

“You know, what was most powerful for me to witness was to see how the simple changing of a gesture, one that was used to taking from the ocean, instead one day that same hand turned around, and instead of taking gave back to the ocean, restoring an entire ecosystem. I think this was very powerful for the fishers to experience.” 

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Alejandro’s work with NOS and the Manglito fishing community shows that your worst enemies can turn into your fiercest allies when you listen to their problems with compassion. 

“My entire career has been devoted to marine conservation, and my forte has been fisheries management. However, I now know that the key to success is not fixing technical fishing issues but healing community problems.”  

The Manglito community was suffering: dependent on fishing for generations, most turned to illegal methods out of desperation, as fish stocks worldwide collapsed due to commercial overfishing. Alejandro managed to win the communities’ love and respect through small acts of compassion, slowly paving the way to a successful collaboration that both regenerated the entire bay and provided a better economic alternative for the fishers who call it home.

Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

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