The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

For Sea Shepherd, the pursuit of the Thunder was about more than exacting justice or protecting a disappearing species of fish. It was about adding teeth to the halfhearted policing of laws on the high seas. But even calling these laws halfhearted would be giving them more credit than they were due.

As an organization, Sea Shepherd cared less about legal nuances than it did about using what it called “direct action” to protect global marine life. Dozens of times over the past several decades, the group had rammed Japanese whaling ships and other vessels that it said were fishing illegally. The modified Jolly Roger, the maritime camouflage, and the shark maw on the prow, like a World War II bomber, put the organization’s zeal on display for all to see. The organization’s mantra captured its vigilante spirit: “Takes a pirate to catch a pirate.”

The thing about danger is you become desensitized to it the more you experience it and emerge unscathed. I don’t experience danger as a drug, nor do I seek it out simply for the thrill, but you become somewhat inured to fear.

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.

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.

Terrifying

“It was like working on an elevator that suddenly dropped and climbed six stories every ten seconds,”

When I interviewed them later, the crew compared the experience of crossing the storms to being “a coin inside a washing machine,” “a Ping-Pong ball in a bathtub,” and a “driver in a demolition derby.”

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. You step on deck to see that ominously low cloud ceiling lifting. Maybe there’s even sun. Doors are latched open. Fresh air pours in.

Hammarstedt called over the radio to Cataldo, the Thunder captain, to ask if everything was okay. There was no reply, which was unusual. Though bitter adversaries, the two captains talked frequently, usually with Cataldo yelling, cursing, and taunting (“You piece of shit,” “You’re an imbecile,” and “You don’t deserve to be a captain”) while Hammarstedt maintained his cool, adding the occasional touch of sarcasm (“Thank you for saying that,” “The feelings are mutual”).

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. One thing, though, was clear: as in most professions, mine included, the longer they did the work, the more they bought into the central narrative that the higher calling at its core is what fortified them at scary moments like this.

Since its founding in 1977, Sea Shepherd had been viewed by the global fishing industry as unpredictable and prone to extremism. For almost as long, the organization’s own leadership had described its mission as “coercive conservation” and referred to its members as “eco-warriors” in the fight to save the oceans.

We have to take care of the little that is left in the seas because if we don’t, there will be nothing left for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

The United States has historically been reluctant to pursue other countries for labor or environmental violations for fear of impinging on trade opportunities or drawing attention to some of the United States’ own questionable practices.

Do as I want, not as I do

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.

At night, there was a book club. They read In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin and The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux.

“If I’m going to have these politics, I need to think through the unintended consequences,” another told me when I asked her why she was reading what looked like a deeply boring book about global food policy.

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.

By 2015, about ninety-four million tons of fish were caught each year, more than the weight of the entire human population.

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.

These technological advances, as well as the industrialization of fishing, are a big reason why catches from the high seas rose 700 percent in the last half a century. They also partly explain why many of the world’s fish stocks are at the brink of collapse.

The pace of overfishing has certainly been accelerated by the image of tireless plenty and the notion that these creatures are more edible than worthy of protection.

I asked at the tiny grocery hut near port if the chicken had been grown on the island. The man at the counter said no. “Imported from China.” Ironic, I thought. The same country poaching Palau’s fish was supplying its chicken.

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.

The more I explored the outlaw ocean, the tougher it became to distinguish the predators from the prey. I had traveled to Palau to focus on the fragile and bleak state of the fish and other marine life here and to understand the foreign poachers who were the tip of the spear of this global oceanic pillage. But it was quickly becoming apparent that this contrast was neither as stark nor as simple as I figured. The men chasing these fish were no less to blame for the depletion of Palau’s waters, but they seemed equally, if not more, vulnerable themselves.

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. It seemed like a pathetically small yield and more proof of the area’s thinning fish stocks.

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. The frequency of these “repeat fliers” spoke to their persistence and desperation. It also left me wondering if Baiei’s mission was more myth of Sisyphus than David and Goliath.

I had come to Palau looking for inspiration and to learn about the global prospects for ocean conservation. If the world’s fish stocks were to have any chance to survive, this archipelago nation might offer some guidance. But I left Palau less with hope than with a painful sense of the barriers to marine preservation. The threats facing the oceans were far bigger and more complex than criminality.

British authorities, not surprisingly, frowned on Roy’s seizure of their platform and ordered him to abandon it. But Roy was as daring as he was stubborn—just the lad to tell them to bugger off.

Mad lad

The ocean can be a cold and predatory environment, a watery incubator for the worst instincts of man and a habitat for the brutal exercise of evolutionary fitness among marine creatures. It’s also a place of discovery, of limitless aspiration and reinvention.

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.

If linguists say that the difference between a dialect and a language is an army, and theologians contend that a cult is a church with no political clout, then the Bates family’s view seemed to be that a platform becomes a country based on its ability to control its narrative. Granted, the narrative seemed so bizarre at times, spinning off into tangents and conspiracy theories, that it would be a challenge for anyone to control. But the Bates family remained the unofficial historians, and years of practice have honed their ability to tell a good tale.

The story line was loopy, even absurd, and hard at times to keep track of what was real. Sealand’s German and Spanish “governments in exile” were a fictitious duplicate of a questionable original. It all reminded me of a quotation from the Jorge Luis Borges short story “Circular Ruins”: “In the dream of the man who was dreaming, the dreamt man awoke.”

The Bates family was certainly daring, but the secret to Sealand’s survival was its limited ambitions. Irreverent but inconsequential, Sealand was not Al-Qaeda or ISIS seeking to create a grand caliphate. In the view of its powerful neighbors, Sealand was merely a rusty kingdom, easier to ignore than to eradicate.

Sealand was never a utopian safe haven; it was always more of an island notion than an island nation, or as one observer once put it, “somewhere between an unincorporated family business and a marionette show.”

In many of the outlaw ocean stories I covered, one consistent theme was how the vastness of the seas made it difficult to chase down bad actors—finding the criminals in the first place was often impossible.

What stood out about the story of the Oyang ships was that safety risks and violations, and the persistent mistreatment of workers, were hiding in plain sight. But at every turn, inspectors and regulators largely shrugged off their responsibilities, often with a crass disdain for the lives at stake.

Like fighter pilots, deep-sea fishing captains are as much born as made. It takes a rare, almost instinctual calm and spatial acuity to steady a 1,870-ton ship while reading the tides, countering gusts, and directing a dozen men scrambling on deck.

The ability of a boat to flush its decks is as essential as humans’ ability to breathe. Water always needs to be leaving the vessel faster than it’s entering. When it’s not, problems multiply quickly.

Pollack is also a popular dish in South Korea, which has at least twenty-eight names for the fish depending on its age, size, and location.

The vessel was also manned by a relatively inexperienced crew. Four of the eleven Koreans, including the captain, were under-qualified and didn’t have the required licenses for their positions. The skipper and the chief engineer had Class 3 marine technician licenses instead of Class 2. The second mate and the first engineer also lacked proper certification. The vessel was without a second engineer, third mate, or communications operator. It was an airplane without a pilot, a classroom without a teacher. A disaster in waiting, sent out to sea.

A company in any other industry that tolerated repeated disasters, saw withering public scrutiny, and yet was still able to continue its business largely uninterrupted would be an international scandal. In the fishing industry, it was par for the course. Trying to prosecute a fishing industry scofflaw was like trying to catch a fish with only your hands.

Even though I had reported on quite a few grim industries over the years (coal mining, long-haul trucking, sex work, garment and glue factories), I was still stunned by the conditions on fishing boats.

What the crew described was certainly an improvement from what conditions had once been. Still, the men on the ship said they worked twenty-hour days, six to seven days a week, earning roughly $400 per month.

The investigator and the union inspector responded that they were simply checking for labor violations. Purwanto said that even if there were violations, it didn’t matter—he needed the job, so he would not say anything more. There was nothing else for him back in Indonesia, he said. “This is the best we can get.”

Few people are as adept at capitalizing on such loopholes in maritime law as Rebecca Gomperts. The Dutch doctor and founder of Women on Waves traverses the globe in a converted medical ship carrying an international team of volunteer doctors that provides abortions in places where it has been criminalized.

found it mind-boggling that he kept doing something that so nearly killed him the first time. And yet he pointed out to me that while he might end up dead stowing away, he might also arrive some place better or get paid $1,000 to be delivered back home. To him, the odds were worth it.

The unfortunate truth was that in much of the maritime world the law protects a ship’s cargo better than its crew.