The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

Rain or shine, shifts ran eighteen to twenty hours. At night, the crew cast their nets when the small silver fish they target—mostly jack mackerel and herring—were more reflective and easier to spot in darker waters.

Drinking water was tightly rationed. Most countertops were crawling with roaches. The toilet was a removable wooden floorboard on deck. At night, vermin cleaned the boys’ unwashed plates. The ship’s mangy dog barely lifted her head when the rats, which roamed on board like carefree city squirrels, ate from her bowl.

Their hands, which virtually never fully dried, had open wounds, slit from fish scales and torn from the nets’ friction. The boys stitched closed the deeper cuts themselves. Infections were constant. Captains never lacked for amphetamines to help the crews work longer, but they rarely stocked antibiotics for infected wounds.

In 2009, the UN conducted a survey of about fifty Cambodian men and boys sold to Thai fishing boats. Of those interviewed by UN personnel, twenty-nine said they witnessed their captain or other officers kill a worker.

Virtually all of the crew had a debt to clear, part of their indentured servitude, a “travel now, pay later” labor system that requires working to pay off money they often had to borrow to sneak illegally into a new country. One of the Cambodian boys approached me, and deeper into our conversation he tried to explain in broken English how elusive this debt became once they left land. Pointing to his own shadow and moving around as if he were trying to grab it, he said, “Can’t catch.”

The rule of law—often so solid on land, bolstered and clarified by centuries of careful wordsmithing, hard-fought jurisdictional lines, and robust enforcement regimes—is fluid at sea, if it’s to be found at all.

Fully half of the world’s peoples now live within a hundred miles of the ocean, and merchant ships haul about 90 percent of the world’s goods. Over 56 million people globally work at sea on fishing boats and another 1.6 million on freighters, tankers, and other types of merchant vessels. And yet journalism about this realm is a rarity, save for the occasional story about Somali pirates or massive oil spills.

This stranded stint port side in Singapore offered my first real exposure to merchant seafarers and long-haul fishermen, and the experience left me riveted by what seemed like a transient tribe of people. These workers are largely invisible to anyone leading a landlocked lifestyle. They have their own lingo, etiquette, superstitions, social hierarchy, codes of discipline, and, based on the stories they told me, catalog of crimes and tradition of impunity.

What became especially clear in these conversations is that moving freight by sea is much cheaper than by air partly because international waters are so uncluttered by national bureaucracies and unconstrained by rules.

Meanwhile, the fishing and shipping industries are as much victims of offshore lawlessness as they are beneficiaries and perpetrators of it.

An escape for some, the sea is also a prison for others. Full of devouring storms, doomed expeditions, shipwrecked sailors, and maniacal hunters, the canon of sea literature offered a vibrant picture of a watery wilderness and its untamed rogues.

But even calling these laws halfhearted would be giving them more credit than they were due. For bad actors like the Thunder, the seas were a vast free-for-all. Largely hidden in the sheer expanse of the world’s ocean, poachers had little reason to look over their shoulders.

Bob Barker: Thunder, Thunder, Thunder. This is the Bob Barker. You are fishing illegally. Thunder: Sorry, sorry. No English. Only Spanish. Bob Barker: That is very lucky because hablo español también.

I would later learn that though the Thunder had broken the law, its captain was correct: Sea Shepherd did not have the authority to arrest anyone. Still, the bluff had its desired effect. The Thunder’s crew, which had been working on the aft deck tossing fish scraps over the side, disappeared inside.

Over the next 110 days, across more than 11,550 nautical miles, three oceans, and two seas, the cat-and-mouse pursuit of the Thunder would take Sea Shepherd’s crew through an unforgiving obstacle course of stadium-sized ice sheets, a ferocious storm, violent clashes, and a near collision.

One of Spain’s poorest regions, Galicia is often described as the “Sicily of Spain” because it is home to the country’s most famous crime syndicates known for smuggling drugs, black-market tobacco, but most often illegal fish.

the illicit seafood trade is a thriving global business that generates an estimated $160 billion in annual sales. The trade in illegal fish has grown over the past decade as improved technology—stronger radar, bigger nets, faster ships—has enabled fishing vessels to plunder the oceans with remarkable efficiency.

The fish is also a favorite entrée in upscale restaurants in the United States and Europe, costing about $30 a fillet. But diners won’t find “toothfish” on menus. There, it is sold under a more palatable name: Chilean sea bass.

Most scientists now agree that the toothfish population is dwindling at an unsustainable rate.

In December 2013, Interpol issued an all points bulletin for police worldwide to arrest the Thunder. This Purple Notice hardly mattered, though, if the Thunder was able to avoid notice.

Scofflaw ships like the Thunder deftly used the tangled skein of confusing, conflicting maritime laws, difficult-to-enforce treaties, and deliberately lax national regulations to evade the law and shed their identities.

The 2,200-horsepower trawler changed names more than a dozen times in its forty-five-year career. During that time, it flew nearly as many flags, including the colors of the U.K., Mongolia, the Seychelles, Belize, and Togo. After it was added to the EU’s blacklist for pirate vessels, Togo revoked the right to fly its flag in 2010. Like an international criminal with multiple passports, the ship’s owner responded by adding the Thunder to two new registries at once.

The Thunder’s name and port registry were not painted on its hull. Instead, they were painted on a metal sign hung from its stern, to be swapped out quickly if needed. Sailors called these signs “James Bond license plates.”

Before embarking on this mission, Chakravarty flew to Mumbai to comb its junkyards and ship-breaking fields in search of parts to build a more powerful winch on the Sam Simon that could haul up the gill nets they hoped to confiscate. Sea Shepherd had also outfitted its ships with $10,000 frequency scanners to pick up buoy transmitters that fishing boats attach to their nets.

To narrow their search of the more than five million square miles of Antarctic waters prowled by toothfish boats, Chakravarty overlaid three types of maps. Ice charts demarcated the ever-shifting melting line where the frozen, impenetrable Antarctic shelf ended and the thawed, navigable fishing waters began. Maritime maps indicated the patches of ocean that were beyond national jurisdiction. Nautical charts located the tallest and broadest of underwater plateaus where toothfish liked to congregate.

Crew members with binoculars took turns in the crow’s nest, a steel perch more than twenty-five feet above the upper deck. It was a loathsome job because the height exaggerated the swaying of the ship, causing bouts of intense seasickness. Later, when I was aboard the Bob Barker, I would spend hours in the crow’s nest, taking in the view and seeing how long I could last. The scariest of carnival rides, it felt as though I were perched atop a swinging metronome.

Gill nets are banned because they are particularly blunt instruments. The bottom of the nets are weighted to drop to the seafloor. Buoys hold up the tops, creating an imperceptible mesh wall that can stretch seven miles across and twenty feet high.

Hauling in the net from the frigid water was a dangerous and brutally arduous task. The net was forty-five miles long, triple the length of Manhattan, and Antarctica is among the coldest and windiest places on earth. The deck of the Sam Simon was partially frozen and cluttered. The crew’s spit froze before landing. The ship’s railings were low. Tripping was easy. Marbled with slush, the polar water below dipped in some places to ninety degrees Fahrenheit below freezing.

Clipboards in hand, several of the Sam Simon’s crew tallied the Thunder’s catch. The resulting logs, which the group eventually handed over to Interpol, detailed the gill nets’ catch. For every four sea creatures netted, one was a toothfish; the rest were bycatch that nobody would want even if they were alive.

Untangling the dead and dying wildlife from those nets, including rays, giant octopuses, dragonfish, and large crabs, was difficult work, emotionally and physically. Some cried, others vomited, but all of them kept working, typically twelve hours a day.

The exhausting work often took a grisly turn. Toothfish can weigh more than 250 pounds each, and the ones that the Sam Simon’s crew pulled on board in the nets had started to rot. The decomposition caused gas to build up inside the carcasses, and with the pressure of the nets some of the bulging fish exploded as they slammed onto the deck.

As the crowd of uniformed officers huddled around him, snapping photographs and scribbling notes, Chakravarty walked them through his seventy-two-point list that itemized the unique characteristics of Thunder’s netting.

The remainder—forty-four miles’ worth of net stacked in a shimmering aqua-green mound taller and longer than a semitrailer truck—would stay on board the Sam Simon. Banned gill net of this type was worth tens of thousands of dollars on the black market. Local authorities had warned that it would likely disappear if left in storage in Mauritius.

In 1977, the organization’s board of directors expelled Watson over an incident in Newfoundland. After he led a team of Greenpeace activists to protest seal hunting, Watson furiously confronted a sealer, throwing the man’s pelts and club in the water. Greenpeace viewed Watson’s behavior in the incident as too aggressive and kicked him out of the organization. He promptly founded Sea Shepherd, branding it as a more radical and more aggressive group than Greenpeace.

When I finally arrived on board the Bob Barker, I asked Hammarstedt whether Sea Shepherd had legal rights to chase and harass illegal fishing ships like the Thunder. He said his crew drew authority from a provision in the UN World Charter for Nature that called on nongovernmental groups to assist in safeguarding nature in areas beyond national jurisdiction. Several maritime lawyers and international policy experts have disagreed with this interpretation. Obstructing fishing vessels (even poachers) and confiscating their gear is illegal, they said. “But no one would prosecute this because it pales in comparison to what the Thunder was doing,” said Kristina Gjerde, an expert on high-seas policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a coalition of environmental groups. “Sea Shepherd knows this.”

Watson had been arrested in 2012 in Germany on a decade-old criminal charge from Costa Rica over a collision between Sea Shepherd and a shark-finning vessel. After spending eight days in a high-security German prison, Watson was released on bail. Placed under house arrest in Frankfurt, he fled to the sea shortly thereafter.

Japan, which announced plans to extradite him as soon as he was recaptured, had also launched an expensive legal fight that was draining Sea Shepherd’s coffers. As of October 2017, Watson remained the target of two international arrest warrants, or Interpol Red Notices, because of ramming incidents and charges filed by police in Japan and Costa Rica.

For Captains Hammarstedt and Chakravarty, Operation Icefish was a chance for Sea Shepherd to remake itself with new targets and tactics. The group had decided, for example, that rather than ramming any of the Bandit 6, they would instead try to stay within the bounds of the law, shadowing while harassing them to the point of stopping.

The second person was Anas Aremeyaw Anas, a Ghanaian reporter I’d known for several years. Though Anas is possibly the most famous investigative journalist in Africa, virtually no one knows his face because he does most of his work undercover.

So feared is Anas among government functionaries in some parts of Africa that his name is invoked by African rappers as a boogeyman of sorts in songs about hustlers and corrupt cops, warning the wayward in the Twi language to watch out because “Anas is coming!”

Bottom trawling was prohibited in the area where we stalled. Still, I thought it probably best not to point out that our law enforcement ship was being rescued by a boat that quite likely had been fishing illegally. It was a little piece of irony I’d have to enjoy by myself.

In February, two months after the chase had begun, but two months before I climbed on board the Sea Shepherd ship, the captain on the Bob Barker, Hammarstedt, and his adversary on the Thunder had come to a shared realization that neither intended to give up the chase. At the time, the two men were crossing some of the world’s most perilous waters.

According to an old sailing proverb, below latitude 40° south there is no law, and below 50° south, no God.

In this famously rough stretch of the Southern Ocean, storms gather force for tens of thousands of miles as they travel east across open water, technically called the fetch, unimpeded by land except for South America’s lower tip. Winds can top two hundred miles per hour. Waves reach ninety feet tall. Polar fronts and trade winds generate an average of one angry storm per week.

During such storms, you tend to stay lying down inside your cabin in hopes of lessening the seasickness. Even the halls inside the ship can be dangerous because things invariably fly around if they aren’t properly tied down. Because you can’t see much outside, you never quite know when the next wave is going to hit and how bad it will rattle the ship.

For the Sea Shepherd crew, lying around was not an option. When ships dock, they often dangle bulky rubbery “Yokohama fenders” over the side—they look like mini-submarines covered in tires—to prevent the ship from scraping or slamming into port walls or pier pilings. During one of the storms, a fender that had been tied down under the wheelhouse of the Bob Barker broke from its tethers.

the chase of the Thunder was a game of endurance. In prior weeks, the Thunder had done everything in its power to prevent its adversaries from replenishing themselves. The Bob Barker and the Sam Simon typically sailed parallel to each other, spread apart by about half a mile. When they moved near each other, the Thunder’s captain assumed they were trying to exchange supplies or top up the other’s fuel tank so he swung his ship around and wedged it between his adversaries.

If riding through angry storms at sea is a rough form of claustrophobia, like being locked inside a tumbling box, then making it to the other side brings a rare and powerful euphoria. A weight lifts. You feel as if you can finally breathe again. You emerge from days spent stuck in your closet-sized cabin.

Also verboten was publishing ship blueprints, which could be seen on display on the walls of the bridge. If there was a confrontation with the Thunder, a water cannon aimed at the right ventilation portal could flood essential areas of one of the Sea Shepherd vessels.

Ships ramming each other—something I’d experience later in Palau, Thailand, and Indonesia—sounds and feels more violent and panic inducing than a car crash. The stakes are higher because such collisions typically result in one or both vessels sinking.