Footage helps bid for trawling moratorium

by Christine McCafferty
Monday, 10 October, 2005

GETTING pelted with potatoes and sewage was not a pleasant experience for former Gisborne man Gareth Hughes, but it was worth it considering the damning footage he and his fellow Rainbow Warrior crew got of bottom sea trawlers.
Mr Hughes was aboard the Rainbow Warrior in June this year when they filmed a Kiwi bottom trawler dumping a 500-year-old gorgonian coral tree overboard, after dragging it up from the sea bed while trawling for orange roughie in international waters of the Tasman Sea.
On Saturday Mr Hughes and three other Greenpeace campaigners were in Gisborne as part of a worldwide campaign to get a United Nations moratorium on bottom trawling in international waters.
The three weeks spent at sea aboard the Rainbow Warrior was a revelation for Mr Hughes, who has been with Greenpeace for the past five years.
"We took traditional Greenpeace non-violent action and attached inflatable life rafts to stop the nets from going down. I guess the fishermen weren’t very happy about it," he said.
No, they probably were not, considering they used an air compressed cannon to fire potatoes and, when those did not deter the Greenies, sewage at their rafts.
But Greenpeace got their own back. Within minutes of filming the footage of coral being thrown overboard, the images were distributed to UN representatives and television media around the world.
Bottom sea trawling is said to be the most destructive fishing practice and scientists say it is wiping out rare deep sea species that are yet to be discovered.
The trawlers take and destroy everything in their path on the seabed, bringing about the extinction of deep-sea creatures, Greenpeace says.
Greenpeace communications officer Dean Baigent-Mercer compared the practice to bulldozing down a rainforest.
"When experimental trawlers discovered orange roughie, it triggered this global goldrush, with commercial fishers wanting to catch as much fish as possible. However, they knew nothing about the habitat and rare creatures they were destroying."
A moratorium would at least give scientists the chance to study the unknown world of the seabed and discover the extent of damage years of bottom sea trawling had caused.
"No one knew up until now just how bad it was," said Mr Hughes.
"Now they are seeing it first hand, people are really starting to take notice of this issue. It was up to us to get these images out there, because it’s not like the fishing industry is going to tell the public what really goes on."
The Greenpeace crew had received a positive response in Gisborne, with many people signing a postcard expressing their concerns about bottom sea trawling, addressed to the Prime Minister.
"We’ve also had a lot of fishermen from Gisborne telling us their stories about what they’ve seen out at sea. We are particularly interested to hear from more people who have worked on bottom trawlers to tell us their experiences," said Mr Hughes.
Greenpeace was in town on Saturday for the final day of their bottom sea trawling roadshow.