The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

Over the next several years, as I’d spend months at sea with such ocean conservation advocates, I developed a list of factors that I thought answered that question. Yes, they cared about fish or, more generally, marine life. To ask them about their purpose was to hear a narrative about resisting broader forces like greed, climate change, and the needless killing of living creatures. But there were visceral motivations, too: adventure, the chance to travel, the thrill of a good fight, seeing places few others knew existed, acquiring practical seafaring skills, the camaraderie of shared purpose.

More than three thousand miles away from Operation Icefish, a different drama was unfolding in the northwest corner of Spain. In Galicia, police raided several offices of suspected illegal fishing companies, including the former headquarters of Vidal Armadores, the infamous fish-poaching company.

the Thunder’s ownership remained a mystery, shrouded by shell companies in the Seychelles, Nigeria, and Panama. Most of all, these companies were protected by distance and transience as their ships stayed in motion and far away from easy inspection. Still, the poachers had an Achilles’ heel. Try as they might to stay at sea, the operators of these ships knew as well that their lives were inextricably tied to land. Their financial resources were always moored to land-based institutions and transactions. Their crews had families to see and debts to pay off. These were inescapable facts of life, and the Spanish investigators knew how to leverage them toward prosecution.

For all the adrenaline involved in kicking down doors to seize such documents and all the exciting press coverage that comes from chasing ships across the world’s oceans in hopes of capturing their officers, the toughest and arguably the most important part of enforcing the law was the unglamorous process of building a prosecution.

Investigating crimes like money laundering, document fraud, and tax evasion—the ones that can land real jail time and hefty fines—takes painstaking diligence and resources. It’s tough enough to make the public care about fish, much less fish laundering, which involves faking the fish’s origin. It’s harder still to get tax dollars dedicated to multinational investigations into ostensibly “bloodless” crimes that seem to matter only on paper.

In good times, vessel owners, insurers, bankers, ship operators, fish buyers, flag registries, and even governments profit from rampant fish piracy on the high seas. In bad times, these actors were insulated from the liability and prying eyes of Interpol, union organizers, human rights advocates, and reporters.

Then, on February 16, officers on the bridge of the Bob Barker noticed tall flames on the back of the Thunder throwing off thick black smoke. An oil slick trailed their ship. Responding to a radio inquiry from Sea Shepherd, the Thunder’s officers claimed, unconvincingly, that it was just their kitchen and bathroom waste—boxes, wrappers, toilet paper, cigarette cartons, and the like. Burning such waste was legal. The flames burned continuously for two days, longer than usual for such fires on a ship of this size.

In launching Operation Icefish, Sea Shepherd emphasized to the press that it was not opposed to fishing, just illegal fishing. This was not a distinction I had heard Sea Shepherd make before, and it struck me as part of the organization’s newly emergent pragmatism. Motivated partly by the success of the Japanese legal pursuit to prosecute Paul Watson, board members within Sea Shepherd had come to believe that their organization needed to cultivate allies if it was to have true impact.

As irked by the competition from these illegal ships as by the burden of having to follow the law when others didn’t, Austral Fisheries began arming the eco-warriors with vital intelligence about who was doing what and where in the Antarctic waters.

There was, however, the outside chance that the Thunder was bound for Nigerian waters for other reasons. The country was home to a booming black market in stolen bunker fuel, which is the heavy residual oil burned by most seagoing ships. Nigeria also had an abundance of marine officials willing, for the right price, to help the Thunder escape by blocking Sea Shepherd’s entry into national waters.

For centuries, the world’s merchant and fishing fleets flew the flag of the country of their home port. That country was responsible for ensuring the proper treatment of the crew and safety of the vessel. This began to change in the early twentieth century with the emergence of “open registries,” also called “flags of convenience.”

Prohibition also drove the shift toward flags of convenience as passenger ships sought to circumvent a U.S. court ruling that American ships could not serve alcohol, even in international waters. In the run-up to World War II, the United States re-flagged more of its merchant ships to Panama in hopes of providing Britain with goods and materials without dragging America into the war or violating the Neutrality Act.

Today, many countries, including landlocked ones such as Mongolia and Bolivia, sell the right to fly their flag. Some of the biggest registries are run by overseas businesses, like the Liberian registry that is overseen by a firm based in Virginia. The company collecting fees for the right to fly a certain flag is also responsible for policing its customers, ensuring they abide by safety, labor, and environmental rules, and conducting investigations when things go wrong. But in practice, flags of convenience double as cloaks of misconduct, creating a perverse incentive for ship operators to shop around for the most lax registries with the lowest prices and fewest regulations.

And the way it functions is akin to being allowed to slap a license plate from any country on your car, regardless of where you live or intend to drive, and the police in charge of inspecting the vehicles and investigating accidents are paid by the drivers themselves.

Painfully sore in my core on my second day on board, I learned quickly not to underestimate how much more grueling burpees are when done on a seesawing ship.

This pointed to a commonly held misconception about these advocates. They were often dismissed as dreadlocked, pierced, and tattooed kids and portrayed as undisciplined and naïve escapists fleeing personal responsibility, the “real world,” and nine-to-five jobs. Mostly, that was false, especially the nine-to-five part because, in fact, they worked even longer days at sea.

Certain clues hinted that the Thunder was scuttled intentionally. The ship’s airtight doors were tied ajar. Valves were opened to flood the engine room. There were no telltale signs—like upended shelves or burst pipes—that suggested the Thunder had collided with another ship. With only a day or so more fuel left in it, the Thunder’s fuel tank offered the most likely explanation for why Cataldo had finally stopped running.

“Why are you speaking to me this way?” Cataldo said with annoyance. “We are both captains, and we should be speaking to each other as equals.”

Cataldo and the ship’s chief engineer and second mechanic were tried and convicted of forgery, pollution, damage to the environment, and recklessness. They were collectively fined over $17 million but mysteriously released, even though their appeal failed in court.

There’s no shortage of laws governing the seas. The real problem is lax enforcement. After all, there is a cold calculus about pursuing ocean-bound territorial battles that is markedly different from land. While some countries will fight over inches of dirt on either side of a border, ocean boundaries are less clear, which makes chasing poachers seemingly futile.

Most of the world’s fish stocks are in crisis from overfishing. By 2050, some studies predict, there will be more plastic waste in the sea than fish, measured in weight. The oceans are despoiled and depleted because most governments have neither the inclination nor the resources to protect them.

The bustle of Palau’s dockside command center that day offered a window on the ad hoc collaboration between countries, companies, and nongovernmental organizations that will probably be necessary to save the world’s oceans.

Though remote, Palau is still cursed by its location, bordered by some of the world’s largest fishing fleets and most insatiable fish markets—Japan, China, and Taiwan to its northwest, Indonesia to the southwest. And despite its stunning natural beauty, Palau is enmeshed in the larger dystopian seascape of the western Pacific Ocean. The region is teeming with super trawlers, state-subsidized poacher fleets, mile-long drift nets, and predator buoys and is being battered by mega cyclones, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, warming marine temperatures, and a Texas-sized gyre of floating trash.

When I asked for Remengesau’s reaction to the hundreds of shark fins found in the hold of the Shin Jyi, he immediately launched into an explanation of the economic impact of killing sharks. Alive, an individual shark is worth over $170,000 annually in tourism dollars, or nearly $2 million over its lifetime, he said. Dead, each sells for $100, and usually that money goes to a foreign poacher.

Served at Chinese weddings and other official banquets, shark-fin soup, which can sell for over $100 per bowl, has for centuries signified wealth. The delicacy became especially popular in the late 1980s as a status symbol for the rapidly growing middle and upper classes in China. To make the soup, the fins, which are cartilage, are ground into translucent noodles. Adding more texture than nutrition or flavor, they are believed to have aphrodisiac and anti-aging effects.

To avoid wasting space and contaminating more valuable catch, deckhands usually throw the rest of the shark back into the water after they cut off the fins, which can sell for a hundred times the cost of the rest of the meat. It is a slow death: the sharks, alive but unable to swim without their fins, sink to the seafloor, where they starve, drown, or are slowly eaten by other fish.

The disappearance of Helen Reef is distinctly important for Palau because its reefs set the country’s southernmost boundary. When this outpost slips under the waterline, Indonesia’s claim to Palau’s waters would expand by about fifty-four thousand square miles. In the same way that the Industrial Revolution started causing irreversible damage to the climate, it transformed the very nature of fishing with deep and lasting consequences for the oceans.

Through many months of reporting on fishing, I was struck by the age-old consistency of the vocation: the typical workday for a fisherman hadn’t changed since the days of Galilee.

With highly mechanized ships that operate more like floating factories, the industry became brutally efficient at stripping the seas of virtually everything in them.

World War II spurred engineers to develop lighter, faster, more durable ships that could travel farther on less fuel. Submarine combat propelled innovation in sonar, helping illuminate the dark fathoms. Finding fish became more a science of spreadsheets than an art of dead reckoning. Subzero onboard freezers freed fishermen from their race against melting refrigerator ice. Innovations in plastics and monofilaments lengthened fishing lines from feet to miles. Lightweight polymer-based nets enabled super-trawlers to rake the ocean with the ruthlessness of two tanks rolling through a rain forest, a mesh of steel cables strung between them.

More than half the global catch is now tossed overboard dead, or it is ground up and pelletized to feed pigs, poultry, and farmed fish.

Two stubborn misconceptions have also played a big role. The first is that aquatic creatures represent a lower order of life.

The second and more important misconception is that the ocean is a place of sui generis abundance. The nineteenth-century British political commentator Henry Schultes captured this notion in 1813, when he wrote, “In addition to a highly productive soil, the seas which surround us afford an inexhaustible mine of wealth—a harvest, ripe for gathering at every time of the year—without the labour of tillage, without the expense of seed or manure, without the payment of rent or taxes.”

The vastness of the ocean also complicates surveillance efforts, even by sophisticated satellite tracking used by the likes of SkyTruth’s Bergman in West Virginia. Seen from above, the world’s largest fishing trawler, the Dutch-flagged Annelies Ilena, has a surface area of about thirty-five hundred square meters—equivalent to eight NBA courts. Even if a satellite were scanning just 1 percent of the Atlantic Ocean, the Annelies Ilena would take up only three-billionths of that swath.

Over the past three decades, FADs became especially popular in commercial fishing fleets, partly as an unintended consequence of the movement to save dolphins. These fleets used to find tuna by looking first for dolphins, which often followed and swam near the surface above tuna schools because it helps them ward off predators. This approach led to hundreds of thousands of dolphins being inadvertently killed as bycatch when they were netted with tuna. In the 1980s and 1990s, the demand for “dolphin-free” tuna pushed many fleets to relocate.

As a result, many of these ships turned to FADs as their new tool for finding tuna, which would feed on the fish gathered there. But this new approach had its problems. Fish other than tuna were drawn to the FADs, which meant fishermen indiscriminately killed large numbers of sharks and sea turtles as well as juvenile tuna before they could breed.

The absence of fish near the FADs served as a reminder that the seas, though vast, were inextricably linked and by no means inexhaustible. The success of Palau’s reserve depended in part on other countries creating their own.

In its grand fight to safeguard its waters, Palau was doing many of the right things, including having created a marine reserve that protected nearly 80 percent of its territorial waters from industrial fishing. But for the country’s conservation efforts to succeed, Palau needed other governments and industries to follow suit.

More than half of the country’s gross domestic product was based on ecotourism, mostly because of people drawn to the world-class snorkeling and scuba diving. In 2015, the average number of tourists per month coming from China soared to nearly eleven thousand from about two thousand the year prior. It turned out, though, that many of these tourists were as eager to eat the fish as they were to see them. Not coincidentally, the variety of exotic seafood appearing on local restaurant menus in Palau grew as well, including banned fish like Napoleon wrasse, hump-head parrot fish, and hawksbill turtles that were mostly caught by local fishermen.

As a Palauan guide explained in English to the boisterous crowd climbing into the lake that they should not touch the jellyfish, two dozen of the wet-suit-wearing Chinese tourists ignored him and were already lifting the creatures out of the water to inspect them.

Fishing ships, particularly in the developing world, are not especially hygienic places. Cram dozens of men into a dank, confined space for months, where they are handling thousands of dead and decaying creatures day in and day out, and you can expect infections.

Ear infections were a constant battle from the persistent moisture. Daily drops of a concoction of 50 percent vinegar, 50 percent rubbing alcohol helped manage the problem but often it stung like hell.

It then dawned on me that the passageway that I had just crawled down was not just the men’s sleeping quarters. It was also the engine’s main exhaust pipe.

Most of the men in the report had never been to sea and did not know the name of their ship, the fishing company they worked for, or even the full name of their captain. Most had handed their identity cards over to the bosun when they stepped on board. Most said that on the day the marine officers chased their boat, they were fleeing because they thought the Palauans, who were not in uniform, were planning to rob them.

One line in the report stood out and lent a chilling coda to the story. After the Chinese poachers traveled hundreds of miles to steal fish from the Palauan waters, leaving behind families and risking life and limb, the crew caught fewer than a dozen fish, over several days of poaching, primarily Lapu Lapu, and several large clams.

Baiei said that in an odd but recurring spectacle, at least once a year a deckhand on an illegal fishing ship from Taiwan, China, or Vietnam reappears in Palauan waters wearing a shirt touting a particular Palauan candidate. Another officer added that he arrested a pirate captain in 2016, and then six months later the same man showed up on a different boat. This time, the man was working as a deckhand.

When they stop to fish for them, the Vietnamese crews hold rubber hoses in their mouths attached to an onboard air compressor. They strap lead weights around their waists to help them dive, often dangerously deeper than a hundred feet, to collect the cucumbers, which can fetch over $300 per pound in China. During an arrest in 2016, Baiei said, one of these divers shot to the surface too quickly, causing excruciating bubbles to form in his joints, getting what is called the bends.

The threats facing the oceans were far bigger and more complex than criminality. Palau’s true adversaries were not best understood as legal or illegal. They were bigger: climate change, unchecked tourism, a vastly untamed geography, and a level of poverty that filled boats with men who cared more about survival than about laws.

Initially, Roy used Roughs for a “pirate” radio station. The BBC, which had a monopoly over the airwaves at the time, played the Beatles, Kinks, Rolling Stones, and other pop bands only in the middle of the night, much to the frustration of young audiences.

Though no country formally recognized Sealand, its sovereignty was hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British government and assorted other groups backed by mercenaries tried and failed to take over the platform by force. In virtually every instance, the Bates family scared them off by firing rifles in their direction, tossing petrol bombs, dropping cinder blocks onto their boats, or pushing their ladders into the sea. Britain had once controlled a vast empire over which the sun never set. Now it found itself unable to touch a rogue micronation barely bigger than the main ballroom in Buckingham Palace.