My Account
Rainbow Warrior II on its first campaign, against driftnets in the Tasman Sea, early 1990.
I took up spearfishing while I was still at university. It made me pretty popular because I’d catch the fish and then give them away. In the early days, you couldn’t enter a spearfishing competition with anything under 8lbs. That meant we were only bringing in species such as kingfish, kahawai, snapper and blue moki. But then they changed the rules and dropped the size limit to half a kilo (2.2lbs) and prizes were given for the range of fish you could bring in. This meant the fishermen would go after species they wouldn’t normally touch. It was really bad from an ecological point of view and I made myself very unpopular by campaigning against it. I don’t regret my years in the sport because I learned a lot, but I wouldn’t do it again.
A Pacific white-sided dolphin drowned in a driftnet in the North Pacific in 1991.
I think my love of the sea started during childhood holidays at Red Beach. Dad and Mum owned a shop in Commerce Street in the city – Bruce Grace for Pleasing Gifts – where they also sold cameras and processed film. Dad was on the Ellerslie Borough Council for a while and I think our trips to the beach were his opportunity to escape his constituents and relax. I’d spend those weekends in the rock pools and when I got my first camera, I started taking close-ups of the insects that lived on the shoreline. They are still the things that fascinate me today. Sadly, my father’s death was very sudden. He attended a wedding in Whangarei where we think he contracted bacterial meningitis and died three days later. On the other hand, my mother Elma happily lived to celebrate her 94th birthday.
Caged Atlantic Bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean Sea, 2006. Destined for “fattening up” for six months before export to Japan, the population is so low the fishery should be closed.
After Auckland Grammar School, I graduated from Auckland University with a Bachelor of Science degree. I went on to do my masters in zoology and finally my PhD on the animals and marine sediments at the entrance to the Whangateau Harbour. I’d learned to scuba dive in 1961 and I was keen to be down on the seafloor to see for myself what was going on. I made my own sampling device, which gave me more precise data than if I’d relied on dredges and grabs. I studied under Professor John Morton and while he was recognised as a world authority on molluscs, he was slightly unnerved by the idea of a marine scientist collecting data underwater. Concerned about my safety, he once asked me, “but what happens if you trip over a rock down there?”
One of the most interesting aspects of my career has been a nearly 20-year association with Greenpeace. My first trip for them was in 1990 when I was invited to join the Rainbow Warrior II’s first campaign. We set out for the Tasman Sea in search of drift netters and my job was to photograph what we found. We located about six Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese ships, each setting about 60 miles of netting a night. They were targeting skipjack tuna but because of the way they laid their nets in parallel lines, the by-catch was enormous. Later that same year I joined a similar campaign in the North Pacific. Every night for three months in the squid season, it was estimated that the boats laid out enough netting to go around the world five or six times. Even worse, huge bundles of netting that they couldn’t be bothered repairing were just tossed overboard. A lot of birds, including NZ seabirds like the Buller shearwaters, which only breed at the Poor Knights, and the sooty shearwater, died in those nets.
Mediterranean grouper in a well-policed marine reserve in Northern Italy, 2006. On many subsequent dives throughout the Mediterranean, apart from the caged tuna we never saw a fish longer than 20cm
We’d dive down at night to document what was being caught and then I’d develop the films. The campaigners would choose the photos they wanted to use from the proof sheets and the prints would be wired off. It took about 10 minutes to send one black and white image in those days. One of the photos I took during my first trip was of a huge sunfish caught in a net, which is still used today to demonstrate the harm that that sort of fishing did.
I went on several Greenpeace missions to the Antarctic Peninsula and on one occasion we documented the state of the many so-called “scientific” bases, where very little effort was being made to properly store fuel or dispose of waste. Greenpeace called on the governments responsible for these sites to clean them up or risk international condemnation. We went back the following year and were surprised to find one of the worst sites completely rehabilitated. But then we revisited photographs from our first visit and realised that what they had done was bulldozed all their rubbish into some nearby pristine lakes and filled them in with gravel. The lakes had completely disappeared. Most of these people were military personnel who had no appreciation of the environment they were in. There were some pretty horrible things going on down there.
Most of my trips were for the purpose of documenting what we saw rather than any direct action, but we still ran into some sticky situations. I once found myself staring down the barrel of a flare gun while chasing a drift-netter in the Timor Sea and there have been other occasions when we’ve had the fire hoses turned on us and frozen lumps of fish thrown at us, which can do some damage if they hit you on the head. Deep sea oil drilling protests took us to St Kilda off the coast of Scotland, we went to Tahiti and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to look at coral bleaching, and in the Mediterranean we toured some of their marine reserves. My last Greenpeace mission was to Toronto where I spoke on marine reserves at a conference in 2013. Unfortunately, I’ve had to take things easy in the last couple of years following a third heart attack in 2014. It triggered a bigger problem of congested heart failure, and my heart is now pumping only about 25 per cent of what it should be. This leads to an accumulation of fluid around the heart and lungs, and I’ve recently had problems with my legs as well.
I guess one of my career highlights occurred in the late 1980s when I spent two weeks on the Calypso with Jacques Cousteau and some of his merry band such as Albert Falco. I was a guide for their short expedition to the Kermadec Islands and actually had the chance to dive with ‘the legend’. I had some very interesting conversations with the man, particularly about the value of the Kermadec spotted, black grouper population. They did a couple of dives with the famous diving saucer at the Kermadecs.
In northern New Zealand large crayfish are now only found in long-established marine reserves. Severe overfishing in CRA2, the area out from Auckland, has led to calls for the fishery to be closed. According to the State of the Gulf report, crayfish are functionally extinct in the Hauraki Gulf.
When I think about our marine environment and the state of our fisheries, it’s hard to find a good news story. Our current fisheries management is appalling and needs a total overhaul. No matter what species you talk about – snapper, crayfish, hapuka or any other – they have been over-fished and in some cases, are on the verge of collapse. The fishing industry has basically hijacked the Ministry for Primary Industries, which is doing nothing to re-set quotas to levels that will actually increase biomass. For instance, on the current recovery programme for snapper, it will take 100 years to get to just 40 per cent of the original biomass. Plus, the Department of Conservation has been stripped of capacity and there is no political will to help them. The fact is that if we want our fish stocks to recover, both recreational and commercial fishermen will have to back off and, unfortunately, that’s not something that looks like happening any time soon
