Episode 4: Shark Finning

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hallå, hallå. Får jag be dig om legitimation, tack. Har du en legitimation? Ja, det är ett leck jag kan försöka på. Okej, har du ett leck, tack. När det kommer till ålderskontroller. Och det är faktiskt. Till alkohol mår folk hälsan bättre. Systembolaget är annorlunda av en anledning.

Du, jag skulle ju köpa några nya palpstält till lagret. Det kanske blev lite mer grejer. De hade ju allt, man hade en skribord, jag köpte en sån här, och kontorstolar, och så hade de en skitsnygd. Vi har inredning för hela arbetsplatsen. Välkommen till ARM. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

And you see a thirty ton whale right out of the water, right bodily out, tail in the works, coming up and just falling back into the water with this gigantic splash and then you come up again and do it you see them breaching, you know, eight, ten, twelve times in a row and uh Just the the just the majesty and the power of of that, you know. The sperm whales. They're relentless. You keep thinking there's there's got to be an engine, there's got to make noise.

It looks just like some weird med medieval version of a submarine. That's David Benson, one of Keith Davis's many observer friends. You see the stars that you n you never see on on land. You know, because there's no hor there's no horizon, there's no mountains, you know, there's no hills, there's no buildings. So y you're you're in the center of this gigantic inverted bowl of the universe. You really do get the this this sense of of how how really insignificant you are.

The bowl of the universe, the limitless expanse of the ocean, but also the claustrophobia of a cabin on a small, crowded boat. Observers live cheek by jowl with the very people that they scrutinize. Bubba Cook is the Western and Central Pacific Tuna Program Manager for the World Wildlife Fund and another one of Keith's friends. He knows how challenging this can be.

Some observers do uh do very well to try and engage the crew and try and be considered part of the crew and and appeal to, you know, the the crew's humanity and they try to secure the captain's respect and and protection and they do a reasonably good job at that but not not everyone can do that and not every vessel is the same and and so, you know, you put yourself at risk when you go out there and

I think for every observer that serves there is that challenge and it's always sitting in the back of your mind, you know, what what might happen and you have to be careful. What could Keith have encountered while on board the Victoria one sixty eight? I'm Rachel Monroe and this is Lost at Sea. Episode 4. Shark Fin. I'm trying to get my head around those emails that Keith sent just before his disappearance. Keith asked an observer colleague for help with identifying sharks.

Keith wrote that mistaking great white sharks and bluefin tuna could cause some serious management issues. Were the emails suggestive of wrongdoing on board or were they just typical messages that observers send back to land? Reading them made me realize how little I know about observers' actual work. I need to try and imagine what it's like for an observer on board a ship like the Victoria 168.

First of all, what draws them to this world? Growing up in California near the coast, my mom, dad, me, and my uh sister and brother, we would go to the beach quite often and My dad would pick up the shells and the sea urchins and he'd pop a sea urchin and say, Hey, hey, try this and we would just eat it. So just having that sense of adventure from a young age loving the ocean from a young age and then having the desire to protect the oceans led me to wanting to have a a career in marine biology.

After Annique Clemens graduated from UC San Diego in two thousand one, she took a training post as an observer in Hawaii. As America reeled from the September 11th attacks, Anique was preparing for a life at sea, putting her degree to use. I was a new biologist and I was working in the field, which

was huge and I was making good money. I was making two hundred dollars a day. So when you go out to sea for thirty days and you come home with six thousand dollars in your bank account as a twenty two year old, that's you know, that's pretty nice. Being a girl of adventure, it was the job of a lifetime. That kind of freedom. miles and miles

blue ocean around and every day was a different day. Every day was an adventure. Like what's gonna happen today? What's the next day gonna bring that's that was more incredible than the last. Well, I was from the Midwest. A friend introduced me to the program in the North Pacific in Alaska. That's the North Pacific Observer Program. I went up there and and Dutch Harbor, Alaska was just the most gorgeous place on earth. There's just mountains all around and the sea.

And all the crew lined up to see who they were gonna get for the next three months. Liz Mitchell, former president of the Association for Professional Observers, spent 25 years at sea. On her first deployment, she stepped off the gangplank into a completely new world. It just hit me like a brick. I loved it. Going out to sea for the first time and nobody spoke English and I didn't speak their language. So we just kind of won it.

Observers work involves careful scientific observation. When fishermen haul their catch on board, observers measure the fish's ear bones to figure out how old they are. They're the ones helping us understand if our oceans are healthy, how pollution or overfishing are harming marine life.

Some of the data on plastics pollution comes from observers, and they're not doing this work in a sterile lab, but on the deck of a boat that's rocking in the waves as fishermen are working all around them. The noise alone can be overwhelming. Very noisy, very noisy, yeah. Constant. Cranes and the strain on on the cables that would hoist net up.

And they broke, you know, occasionally. That could, you know, chop off someone's head. But once they brought it up and landed it on Then I would come out and I'd have to get on top bag of fish and measure it, they'd open the hatch and the fish would flow down to the factory below. When you're fishing, the job was to be present during the setting of the gear. Six hours. Forty miles of long line with 30 hooks between each buoy and they would set about 3,000 hooks.

So when they bringing the lines in with all the the hooks in, um, it could take anywhere from six hours to maybe twelve hours depending on how much fish was on the line. If they had pinpointed the spot where they thought the tuna were running, you know, we might get a hundred tuna that night. And we're filling a fishing hold of uh thirty thousand gallons.

So it might take 30 days. They might fill it in two weeks, just depending on how good they were at getting on those fish. Anique never told her parents about half the stuff that happened on the high seas. You know, fires on the boat. running out of food, running out of water where you had to boil salt water on the stove so you had drinking water. So you learn survival techniques, you learn how to deal with loneliness and and not having anyone to talk to for weeks at a time.

I kept coming back. I kept coming back because it became an addiction to being out on the water. You know, I had the experience of actually seeing the green flash, like when the sun drops down on the horizon and it so clear that you you see that sun like dip into the water and p I thought it was a myth, but it's real, you've seen it. I would have never been able to see that anywhere else.

Yeah, I always try to take a picture of it but you're always just, you know, a second too late. Most observers are men, and wherever you are in the world, fishing crews are almost entirely male. So what's it like for a female observer on board a tuna boat with a captain and four or five crewmen for company?

Usually a crew member would give up their bed for the observer and then the observer would be in a bunk room with another crew on top of them and then two other crew on the other side and then maybe one on the floor and then the captain usually would stay in their own quarters or in the wheelhouse. And a lot of times we did not have toilets. We had a bucket with our name on it. A lot of times we didn't have a shower. We had just saltwater hose.

So I'd be the only female on the vessel and a lot of these fishermen were on contract for a two year contract and hadn't seen a woman in a year. And so I tried to make myself as uh Unappealing as possible. How did you do that? baggy clothes and you weren't taking a shower so you smelled so you know hopefully it was giving off the vibes of stay away. Maybe it is a great bonding experience, but when I think of Keith's position, I also think of how it makes you so vulnerable.

In these miniature floating nations, communication can be fraught. This is Dan. He's an observer from the Pacific Islands. He didn't want us to use his real name. You can hear his pet bird in the background. Asian flagged vessels like Taiwanese and uh Korean, they have a sort of boat language which is a mixture of Mandarin, English, Indonesian, pidgin as well too.

Normally those Asian boats they usually have translators on board as well. Especially on board vessels where language is a barrier. Y it's hard to communicate with other persons on board. That is sometimes it it gets very lonely. Uh the most loneliest vessel I've been on is a Spanish vessel.

which majority of the crew officers they they speak little English or maybe they just pretend to speak no English I don't know I don't speak Spanish much so you have to adjust or adapt into that setting and then communicate by uh having like a translation app or Having a translation book with you on board. On board Keith's ship, the Victoria 168, the crew members were from Taiwan, Myanmar, and China. As far as we know, Keith spoke only English.

Basic communication must have required so much skill and sensitivity. You have to have personal skills. You have to be diplomatic in your approach. On board fishing vessels you have a multicultural setting. Some of the cultures it's uh they can collide too like like sometimes you might make a joke but then according to the other person's culture it's it's an insult.

you're stuck to the confinement of the vessel. You're with people who you don't necessarily choose to be with. You don't necessarily have anything in common or or anything binding you together. And so naturally uh conflicts arise.

That's a British observer we're calling Ricky. He also wants to remain anonymous. Like Anik, observing was one of his first real jobs. on one of the vessels we were on, whilst we were at sea, it was the holy month of Ramadan. And these were an Indonesian crew and the the captain was Korean and he particularly liked pork.

The captain asked the chef to prepare some pork, and of course the chef, wanting to keep his job, starts cooking this pork. Meanwhile, another Indonesian guy starts having a go at the chef, you know, saying, Why are you put cooking pork on Ramadan?

The the guy just loses his temper and pulls out a knife from the kitchen and and threatens the chef. When there's conflict at sea, there's nowhere to go to cool off or calm down. And it took all captain to intervene and basically say, you know, I'm the captain, what I say goes, he's cooking pork, and that's the end of that.

On these vessels, these captains, they're king. I in fact I'd say they're further than a king. They're a god because everything they say goes. If they say jump, the crew jump. They have to, it's survival. The captain Is the law and he's the only law because there's no oversight, there's no one, there's no one enforcing any rules.

And for some observers, when something does go wrong, there's no one to appeal to for help. No one looking out for you. Martin Purvis from the International Pole and Line Foundation used to be an observer. It was normal for him to see nine. Uh I was on a boat once where the crew told me at a trip just before I got on, the cook disappeared one night. Well he definitely went over the side, but no one knows the the circumstances.

circumstances or someone knows potentially it could have been foul play, it could have been uh suicide, it could have been an accident. You never know and there's no uh transparency in how these investigations have been conducted. The captain is king or god, near complete isolation, suspicious deaths. I've heard so many troubling stories, and I don't know how true they are. How an argument over what to eat can be amplified in the tight

closed world of a small boat, and even more worrying that someone can disappear over the rail at night without anyone knowing. Or maybe everyone did know. It's no secret that Keith sometimes struggled with the conflict and claustrophobia of life on board. He was working on a book.

Gathering observer testimonies and tales from the high seas. His friends completed the project and had it self-published. It's called Eyes on the Seas. There's a passage that Keith wrote that stands out to me. Looking at it now, it seems almost prophetic. I'll just read it for you. Deep in factory water because the sump pump is blocked up. While struggling through a bad trip when no one seems to be happy and everyone's frustrations seem to be coming my way.

Near frozen still on the deck, while tallying fish on a set of thumb counters for hours on end. Incessantly worrying about how everyone back on land is doing without me. Those are the moments when I question why I keep coming back. What good am I doing? What good is it doing? I hope that my knowledge and Safety and diplomacy are enough to keep me safe and happy. What if Keith's skills weren't enough to keep him safe?

Bubba Cook worked with a lot of observers, and he knows all about the diplomatic tightrope that observers have to walk. It becomes a question, it's like, you know, do I report this or do I look the other way? Because they saw me see this happen. And if I report it, I know that I could be at risk.

Observers sometimes don't have a secure way to communicate with authorities on shore. There's no phone signal and very limited Wi-Fi. We know that Keith could only send emails through the captain's equipment, so nothing private could be transmitted. No wonder that observers often stay silent. It's difficult to get observers to speak.

And there's reasons for that. Obviously if they get outed as a snitch, that means that every subsequent trip that they take, they're even further at risk than they were before. I'm starting to understand how precarious life at sea can be. But Keith was experienced. He'd spent most of his working life on fishing vessels. So what can we know about this last trip?

Liz Mitchell from the Association for Professional Observers gave me dozens of photographs that Keith took on this last trip. Looking at them is like seeing things through his eyes, his camera lens. You get glimpses of what life might have been like for the other crew members. You see h how small the ships are and how little space there is for for living, right? Um the fishermen sometimes they're working in those big rubber boots but sometimes they're they're just wearing shorts and flip flops.

One of the deck hands took a picture of Keith. It's date-stamped August 2015, so a month before he disappeared. Keith's with two deckhands wearing a baseball cap. Everybody's grinning, and the deck hands are both giving a thumbs up. Keith looks happy. He looks like he's having a good time with these guys. Liz traced the photo back to the Facebook page of another desk.

We tried to contact him for this podcast, but he didn't respond. I spent a while combing through his Facebook profile, just trying to understand something about the life of a deckhand on a tuna boat. He has four thousand Facebook friends, which is twice as many as me, and he posts a lot of memes and selfies and endless videos from his voyages etc.

So in this one video, I mean it it looks it's the middle of the night and the boat is just crashing through these waves. It must be a huge storm. Oh my god, these waves are just splashing. flashing up on the deck. Everybody's wearing slickers, but they're soaked anyway and the camera is kind of joggling back and forth. There's another video on his Facebook page that's pretty unnerving to watch. It's from 2017, two years after Keith disappeared.

Somebody's leaning over the hull of the boat and there's this huge shark in the water and it's just thrashing and it's on some rope. It's like a battle between these guys and this Huge shark. They get the rope around its like tail fin and hauling it on board and you just get the sense of how heavy this thing must be. I mean it takes like a whole bunch of them to just get it up out of the

And now it's on board and he's got this big knife and he's just hacking its fins off. Martin Parvis has seen this stuff before. And through his non profit, the International Pole and Line Foundation, he advocates for better and more sustainable tuna fishing. Where sharks are finned they are hauled aboard the boat and in some cases they are killed first before they are finned, but in some cases the fins are cut off and the carcass is thrown uh uh overboard or not the carcass, the live animal.

The funds are then hung up to dry on deck. Shark fitting is often illegal, but it's also lucrative. Shark fins supply markets all over Asia where they fetch a very high price, especially for shark fin soup. You know, it's underworld, underground type of activity and uh the cash, the money that they make out of that is divided up between the crew and uh it is seen as a way to support their meager incomes.

Some shark species have declined by over 80% over the past half century, and shark finning is one reason why. The levels of sharks that are Disappearing. is of huge concern. Uh and there's been campaigns across the world to try and expose this and try and expose businesses that are connected to the the shark finning industry, but it has persisted because um of the high demand that's still

continues. Un unfortunately, you know, those type of uh practices drive a lot of other illegal practices as well. These type of boats operate far offshore, on the high seas. They often have very long periods that they spend out at sea, and no one really knows what's happening on those boats.

From my perspective and having experienced different types of fisheries all over the world uh longliners and the longline caught fish that they produce are not the most environmentally friendly way of fishing and uh and it's also very concerning that um you know the the the crew are often entrapped on uh on these long liners in very abusive type of situations. Now that is a bit of a generalization, but I think in fisheries, especially on the high seas, it's a bit like the Wild West out there.

We don't know whether shark fitting was even happening on Keith's voyage, but I can see how sensitive these situations are. Observers are in a delicate position. They live with the crew, but they're not part of the crew. And out there on the sea, days away from shore, they might see all sorts of abuses. If the seas are the Wild West, observers are not the sheriff. They can't arrest anyone. All they can do is observe and report.

I took pictures of a diesel spill while at sea. And the diesel spill occurred when the transshipment vessel was bunkering fuel over to the fishing vessel, right? So we're pumping hundreds of liters of fuel across.

and it's not uncommon for some amount of diesel to be spill. This is the observer that we're calling Ricky. But in this instance the fishing crew took their eyes off of it and the the diesel tank essentially overflowed and I don't know, hundreds of liters of diesel spilt into the ocean. Naturally, I started taking photos of this happening because to me this is this is quite a big deal.

The captain of the longline vessel saw me taking pictures of this and started to ask me to remove the video or stop taking videos. That evening, the operator of the company that owns the other vessel phoned Ricky's boat and asked to speak with him. And they said, can you please delete the photos you took today of the fishing vessel and the diesel spill?

At this point I was a bit concerned, like how have they heard about this incident when we're in the middle of the ocean? And so I just said to them, I've already told my employers about the diesel spill. I've already sent them a message. And so that means that I can't delete it because I've already told my employers about it.

When we pulled back into port, almost immediately once we w once we were dockside, a representative from the transshipment company came on board the vessel, came to my cabin, and he said, let's take a little walk. So we got out of the vessel, walked along um walked along the port side, my first time touching land in four weeks, and he said, can you delete those photos of the diesel spill? If you do, we can make your stay here more comfortable. And I just said that.

I can't accept a bribe. I have already submitted it. And also I I knew at that point because I'd called my office that that level of diesel spill, a couple of hundred uh litres. Actually they can't be fined, they can't get in any trouble for that. Once again, there's no evidence to suggest that something like this could have happened to Keith on board the Victoria 168. From what I've heard from Keith's circle, he doesn't strike me as someone who'd accept a bribe either.

He was so influential in the observer community. He did his job well and he had been a an observer for 16 years. and advocated fiercely uh for observers. And so, you know, he had a a well deserved reputation in the community as as being a champion for observers and observer rights. Then Bubba said something that made me see the world of observers in a different light. He was also dedicated to causes of social justice and human rights and and labor rights, and he was one of the first people.

to bring forward video of crew members sleeping in hallways and issues of abuse of crew on board vessels and the need to address those issues. What if Keith put himself in a vulnerable position? Prisoners of the sea. We worked 24 hours. 24 hours. We don't have time to rest. We don't have good food to eat. We don't have water to drink, good water to drink. Lost at Sea is a B B C. Podcast unit production for BBC Five Live. It's presented by me. The series producer is Monica Witt. Sound as well.

John Nichols. The executive producer is The commissioning executive This is Gangster. In this new podcast series, we tell the incredible story of one of the wealthiest, most successful criminals in British history. Curtis Warren's drug empire was global. The town of Cali has become the undisputed world capital of cocaine.

Of gangland feuds, police corruption and armed robbery. By the time he got to us he was in a very, very bad way. We dug up the garden. There was a million pounds. This is gangster. Listen first. on BBC Sounds. Drömmer du om en nymålad fasad eller kanske bara en nyåljad terras? Sluta drömma! Med butiker i hela Sverige hjälper vi dig med allt från val av färg och kulör till terrassåja för altan omöbler. Välkommen in till Alkros Studio! Hos oss får du en skinande renbild.

Och medlemsrabatt på alla vars. Du väljer själv om du vill tvätta med eller utan borstar. Kållbart från endast 159 kronor. Välkommen till Cirque.