Perreault Magazine - 49 -
The campaign was swift and the results are awesome.
The Bandit Six,
the outlaw fleet of Southern Ocean
high seas poachers
have all been
shut down.
And Sea Shepherd
did it.
Fifteen months ago Sea Shepherd initiated the most effective marine anti-poaching campaign in history and it was successful because Sea Shepherd not only initiated it, Sea Shepherd pursued it and did not give up until the entire criminal operation was shut down.
For the first time in over a decade the ruthlessly overfished populations of Antarctic toothfish (Dissostichus mawsoni) are safe from the destructive gill nets of the Bandit Six, the notorious criminal fleet that has been operating under bogus flags, names and registrations with impunity.
What is the point of international conservation law when governments simply fail to enforce
the laws?
These six unregistered and non-licensed ships plundered the Southern Ocean, stealing tens of millions of dollars/euros of Antarctic toothfish (marketed as Chilean Sea Bass). Each ship has borne multiple names but Sea Shepherd tagged each with just one of their bogus names and in December 2014, two Sea Shepherd ships, the SAM SIMON and the BOB BARKER set out from Australia and New Zealand to hunt down the THUNDER, PERLON, SONGHUA, YONG DING, KUNLUN and VIKING.
The first to be found was the THUNDER by the BOB BARKER. The THUNDER was the most notorious of the six. They dropped their net and ran with the BOB BARKER in full pursuit, a pursuit that would last for 110 days, the longest high seas pursuit of a poacher in Maritime history.
With the chase on, the SAM SIMON moved in and began the tedious operation of confiscating 72 kilometers of gill net, pulling it in from two nautical miles from the depths. It took over 200 hours to haul in some seventy tons of gear. One of the crew called it an “ecological weapon of mass destruction.”