Swooping 'bird of prey' keeps fishing boats honest

By SIMON COLLINS

The grey Air Force Orion dropped through the cloud like an eagle after its prey.

Above the cloud, the approach to the South Pole looked pretty much like any other view from a high-level jet - a vast white carpet stretching out to the horizon.

But as pilot Scott Williams lowered the plane blindly and gingerly through the mist, suddenly a new scene opened up - shiny-white, flat-topped icebergs floating on a dark sea under the low cloud.

The bergs, ringed by perhaps 30m ice cliffs, confused the Orion's radar.

Yet after flying above the clouds for four hours and 40 minutes from Dunedin, it took the air crew only five minutes to find the Russian longliner Yantar fishing among the ice at 70 deg south.

The aircraft turned around and flew past the Yantar a second time while Lieutenant Commander Grant Fletcher, a naval reserve officer who speaks Russian, interrogated the ship's captain by radio with standard questions about what the boat was doing and what it had seen.

As it happened, it was there legally, with a New Zealand Government permit to catch Antarctic toothfish. So it was back up through the clouds, heading about one degree further south to the next blip on the radar - the Gutni Olaffson, a 47m boat operated by Vela Fishing out of Lyttelton, also with a New Zealand permit to be there.

Commander Fletcher said the captain sounded foreign. In fact, he had been hired from the Faroe Islands near Iceland to provide ice experience for Vela's first fishing season in the Antarctic.

So the Orion turned back northwards.

It found four other vessels: a Russian ship and three New Zealand boats, two operated by Nelson-based Sealord and one by Sanford out of Timaru.

One of the Sealord vessels, the Janus, was in heavy seas with waves washing across its bow. Its captain joked that he could do with a lift home after being at sea since December.

"I think when you are at sea you are always glad to see someone turn up. It's a friendly face," Commander Fletcher said.

On this trip, as on all other surveillance flights by the Orions so far, all the vessels were there legally. Pirate fishing boats which have penetrated more accessible parts of Antarctica have not, apparently, made it to the New Zealand-administered Ross Sea.

It may be just a matter of time. Or it may be that the very presence of the Orions deters the pirates.

With direct running costs of $10,000 an hour, a crew of 13 and 28 tonnes of fuel for every 12-hour return flight from Dunedin, the Orions don't come cheap.

But if they continue to scare away pirate fishing companies, they may earn their keep.