12.45pm
An international marine mammal protection group says it has confiscated a 13km long driftnet found in the mid-Pacific ocean.
The crew of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel Farley Mowat were sailing from Auckland to Panama when they came upon the net on Sunday (NZ time) at 5 degrees North and
156 degrees West. That position is north of Christmas Island and east of Palmyra Atoll in the Line Islands group.
Society president Paul Watson says the crew of fourteen volunteers spent most of the day retrieving the line with hooks and floats. They took aboard 259 hooks, spaced about fifty metres apart, indicating that the total length of the net was about thirteen kilometres.
Watson says the hooks were baited with squid. Crewmembers removed and freed nine sharks from the line. Tuna and marlin caught on the line were dead and were returned to the sea.
The long line had no marks of ownership or nationality and Sea Shepherd crew claimed the line as salvage.
In 1991, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a consensus resolution (Resolution 46/215) calling for a global moratorium on all large-scale pelagic driftnet fishing on the high seas of the world's oceans and seas by the end of 1992.
The UN also encouraged all members of the international community to take measures, individually and collectively, to prevent such fishing operations after the deadline.
Watson says his crew have confiscated hundreds of kilometres of long lines over the last few years.
Herald Feature: Conservation and Environment
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