June 17, 2013
Monday 17 June 2013
The only water we tried today was the shower´s. Neither ROV or diving, we “opened” this Monday traveling from Denmark to Sweden across the beautiful Oresundsbron´s bridge. Our destination was three fishing ports: Glommen, Traslovslage and Bua, and our goal, the fishing vessels based in there. So Gorka and I spent a few hours documenting everything that was floating and seemed to be used for commercial fishing. Besides the boats, we focused on the fishing gears they were equipped with, especially when there was something we did not know (we trust our fisheries experts to find it out). In addition to the nets, we found some curious things. A classic in the area includes pirate flags, many ships have them, but in the port of Traslovslage we found a rather original vessel; on its hull it´s got a drawing of Olaf the Viking carrying an ax and facing a small lobster. In the cold north they also have a sense of humor.
The three ports altogether result in a good number of various size boats, almost all of them are equipped with trawl nets, but we got to see some fish pots though. I took around 250 pictures and Gorka´s camera battery almost ran out of power. A good harvest to be added to Oceana´s extensive files on fishing activities in the Baltic Sea. But before that happens, here comes the hardest work for me to do: to classify and identify all the vessels on the images. For every shooting hour, I will need at least one more hour working on the computer. That´s time we do not have with the rhythm of field work of this campaign. So we will have to do it once the expedition is over.