‘Like cities floating on the sea’ – industrial fishing is plundering our oceans.

The only sounds I remember that night were the steady repetition of our crew member’s voice calling out on the radio, “Fu Yuan Yu, Fu Yuan Yu, this is Arctic Sunrise”, and later the sound of a warning horn blowing loudly as we got close to a nautical mile away.  Waiting until nightfall, the captain Fernando Romo had maneuvered our ship, the Arctic Sunrise, closer to the fleet we’d been trying to contact via radio. The atmosphere on the bridge, where the ship is controlled, was quite tense.

In the middle of the Indian Ocean, miles from land, in the dead of night and days since we’d last seen a ship, we found ourselves on the edge of what looked like a city on the high seas. Bright white, green and yellow lights were illuminating the black night and showing up clouds on the horizon. My first thought was it looked like spaceships had landed on the ocean, but these were the Chinese squid fishing boats that Greenpeace’s investigators had been looking for.