China chases Indonesia's fishing fleets, staking claim to sea's riches

An Indonesian fishing boat heads out to sea in domestic waters, where they have seen their catches dwindle since Chinese fishing boats have been fishing closer to Indonesian water, near Natuna, Indonesia, in January.
Photographs by Adam Dean

From NYTimes by Hannah Beech and Muktita Suhartono

The Indonesian government appears to have backed away from confronting China, its largest partner.
"Our fishermen feel scared,", one official said

Dedi knows where the fish run strongest in Indonesian waters off the Natuna islands.
The Chinese know, too.
Backed by armed Chinese Coast Guard ships, Chinese fishing fleets have been raiding the rich waters of the South China Sea that are internationally recognized as exclusively Indonesia’s to fish.

While Mr. Dedi catches the traditional way, with nets and lines, the steel Chinese trawlers scrape the bottom of the sea, destroying other marine life.
So not only does the Chinese trawling breach maritime borders, it also leaves a lifeless seascape in its wake.
“They come into our waters and kill everything,” said Mr. Dedi, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name. “I don’t understand why our government doesn’t protect us.”

Wary of offending Indonesia’s largest trading partner, Indonesian officials have played down incursions by Chinese fishing boats, trying to avoid conflict with Beijing over China’s sprawling claims in these waters.
But with the Chinese presence growing more aggressive, fishers in the Natunas are feeling vulnerable.
“There was a vacant period, then China came back,” said Ngesti Yuni Suprapti, the deputy regent of the Natuna archipelago.
“Our fishermen feel scared.”

The latest episode occurred in February, fishers said, when Chinese fishing boats flanked by Chinese Coast Guard vessels dropped their trawl nets yet again.
It seemed as if the coronavirus outbreak peaking in China at the time hadn’t diminished the country’s global ambitions.

A crew heading out to sea.

The Indonesian fisheries ministry, however, denied any intrusion by the Chinese.
The Indonesian government does not provide data on incursions by foreign fishing boats.

China’s illegal fishing near the Natunas carries global consequence, reminding regional governments of Beijing’s expanding claims to a waterway through which one-third of the world’s maritime trade flows.
But local leaders in the Natunas don’t control what happens near their shores.

“We only have authority over our land,” said Andes Putra, the head of the Natunas’ Parliament.
“The provincial and central governments handle the seas.”

Yet with multiple agencies responsible for protecting the seas — the navy, the coast guard, the marine police and the fisheries ministry, to name a few — decision-making is diffuse, analysts said.

“There is a lack of a single coherent lead agency or a single coherent policy for maritime security,” said Evan Laksmana, a senior researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital.
“The Chinese can take advantage of that.”

Idil Basri, the captain of a Natuna fishing boat.

Chinese impunity was on full display in January when President Joko Widodo of Indonesia visited the Natunas.

“There is no bargaining when it comes to our sovereignty,” Mr. Joko said.
Earlier, Indonesian fighter jets buzzed the sky, while warships patrolled the seas.

But the day after Mr. Joko left the Natunas, the Chinese showed up again.
Its fishing fleet, backed by the Chinese Coast Guard, took days to leave the area, local officials and fishers said.

The fisheries ministry denied that any such incident had taken place.

On Chinese maps, a line made of nine dashes scoops out most of the South China Sea as China’s.
One of the dashes slices through waters north of the Natunas.

 by The NYTimes

While Beijing recognizes Indonesian sovereignty over the Natunas themselves, the Chinese Foreign Ministry describes the nearby sea as China’s “traditional fishing grounds.”

“Whether the Indonesian side accepts it or not, nothing will change the objective fact that China has rights and interests over the relevant waters,” Geng Shuang, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in January.

In 2016, an international tribunal dismissed the nine-dash line as legally baseless.
The Chinese government ignored the ruling.

Instead, Beijing continued turning contested atolls and islets into military bases from which China can project its power across the South China Sea.
“Little by little, I think the Chinese will take the Indonesian sea, the Philippine Sea, the Vietnamese sea,” said Wandarman, a fisherman in the Natunas.
“They are hungry: oil, natural gas and lots and lots of fish.”

The Chinese fishers are helping feed the country’s growing appetite for seafood by trawling the South China Sea.

But they are also serving a broader purpose.

“Beijing wants Chinese fishers to operate here,” said Ryan Martinson, an assistant professor at the China Maritime Studies Institute at the United States Naval War College, “because their presence helps to embody China’s maritime claims.”

During Mr. Joko’s first term, his fisheries minister, Susi Pudjiastuti, stood up to China and other countries illegally operating in Indonesian waters.

A fish market in Natuna.

The navy fired warning shots at Chinese fishing boats.
Ms. Susi ordered the seizure of foreign boats.
She had dozens blown up.

One, a Vietnamese trawler, still slumps half submerged in a Natuna harbor.

As a result of Ms. Susi’s boat-sinking policy, the Chinese boats stopped intruding in large numbers, fishers in the Natunas said.
“She protected us, and she protected Indonesia,” said Idil Basri, the captain of a Natuna fishing boat.

But Ms. Susi’s stance, while popular with the public, irked others in government, who found her too confrontational, political analysts said.
When Mr. Joko chose his ministers for his second term last October, Ms. Susi, a fishing magnate, was gone, replaced by a minister considered more conciliatory to China.

In the Natunas, the change was almost immediate, fishers said.

“The Chinese boats came back,” Mr. Dedi said.

In late October, one day after Mr. Joko’s new cabinet was installed, Mr. Dedi’s boat was well within the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone in which only Indonesians are permitted by international law to fish.

A Chinese Coast Guard vessel appeared, then another.
Mr. Dedi scrambled to record video of his boat’s coordinates, 72 nautical miles north of the Natunas.

While it is not illegal for foreign military vessels to transit through these waters, the coast guard ships were protecting Chinese trawlers.

A fisherman rides his scooter down a fishing dock.

After handing over his video to local maritime authorities, Mr. Dedi waited for action.
Nothing happened, so he posted it on Facebook.
Indonesian security services called him, he said, and sounded vaguely threatening.
Mr. Dedi continued to have run-ins with Chinese boats through February.
In one case, he was in a standoff with the Chinese for an hour before he turned around for lack of Indonesian backup.

“We left, but they were still there in Indonesian waters,” Mr. Dedi said.

A Vietnamese fishing boat caught fishing in Indonesian waters is seen sunk off the coast of Natuna.

China’s buildup on disputed outposts in the South China Sea has boosted the ability of its coast guard to ply the waters near the Natunas.
During storms, Chinese fishing boats can shelter at these artificial islands, too.

In 2016, as Indonesian authorities tried to tow in a Chinese boat operating off the Natunas, a Chinese Coast Guard ship nosed in and broke the towline, allowing the Chinese fishers to flee.

To counter China’s presence, Indonesia began building a military base in the Natunas four years ago.
Today, the facility is moldering, empty of all but a few soldiers.

Jakarta’s latest tactic is to relocate hundreds of fishers from the populous Indonesian island of Java to the Natunas to act as maritime sentries.
But fishers in the Natunas oppose the idea, since the Javanese are subsidized by the state and do the same destructive bottom trawling as the Chinese.

Mr. Wandarman said that because of the profusion of foreign boats in recent months, his catch had declined by half.
But fishing is his livelihood, Mr. Wandarman said.
The island he lives on has only two traffic lights, and not much to support it economically besides the sea.
“Our boats are small and wooden, and the Chinese Coast Guard is armed and modern,” Mr. Wandarman said.
“My fear out there is bigger than the sea is big.”

The crew of an Indonesian fishing boat heads out to sea.

Links :

• The Diplomat : Indonesia's Natuna Challenge
• Jakarta Post : Who can fish in waters near Natuna Islands and how? / Rethinking borderless world: Lesson from South China Sea
• Modern Diplomacy : China's aggressive moves in South China Sea

The incredible autonomous ships of the future: run by artificial intelligence rather than a crew

The Incredible Autonomous Ships Of The Future:

Run By Artificial Intelligence Rather Than A Crew

Adobe Stock/ Bernard Marr

From Forbes by Bernard Marr

There has been a lot of discussion about autonomous vehicles on the land and in the air, but what about on the sea?
While the world got the first glimpse of a fully autonomous ferry thanks to the collaboration between Rolls-Royce and Finferries, the state-owned ferry operator of Finland, there’s still quite a bit of work to be done before we can expect the world’s waterways to be overtaken with autonomous vessels.

Levels of Autonomy

Even though we might be years or even decades away from the majority of vessels becoming autonomous, there are certainly artificial intelligence algorithms at work today.
A fully autonomous ship would be considered a vessel that can operate on its own without a crew.
Remote ships are those that are operated by a human from shore, and an automated ship runs software that manages its movements.
As the technology matures, more types of ships will likely transition from being manned to having some autonomous capabilities.
Autonomous ships might be used for some applications, but it's quite possible that there will still be crew onboard some ships even if all hurdles to acquiring a fully autonomous fleet are crossed.

Autonomy in Ships

As we saw with the Finnish ferry, the first autonomous ships will be deployed on simple inland or coastal liner applications where waters are calm, the route is simple, and there isn't much traffic.

There’s also an inland electric container ship, Yara Birkeland, under construction that is expected to be completed in 2020 and fully autonomous by 2022.
Some companies are building fully autonomous ships from scratch, while other start-ups are developing semi-autonomous systems to be used on existing vessels.
When Rolls-Royce sold its autonomous maritime division to Kongsberg, it gave the Norwegian company a boost in its goal of being a leader in the autonomous shipping industry.
Samsung is another company that uses machine learning, augmented reality, analytics, and more to create a smart shipping platform through its Samsung Heavy Industries division.

Existing cargo ships have the chance to get retrofitted with autonomous technologies thanks to the efforts of start-ups such as San Francisco-based Shone.
Shone’s technology helps crews with piloting assistance and to detect and predict the movement of other vessels in the waterway.

Benefits of Autonomous Ships

Just as artificial intelligence and autonomy promise in other applications, it is expected that autonomous ships can improve safety, increase efficiency, and relieve humans from unsafe and repetitive tasks.

According to a study by Allianz, between 75% and 96% of maritime accidents are caused by human error.
If autonomous and semi-autonomous systems can help reduce the reliance on humans that can make mistakes due to fatigue or bad judgment, autonomous ships could eventually make our oceans safer.
Even if a crew is on board, the data gathered from the ship’s sensors combined with artificial intelligence algorithms will help the crew make better-informed decisions.

A reduction or elimination of crew reduces the personnel and auxiliary costs (such as onboard provisions and insurance) on a voyage.
Typically, crew-related expenses account for 30% of the budget.
There are also efficiencies realized in ship design and use of fuel.
One study projected savings of more than $7 million over 25 years per autonomous vessel from fuel savings and crew supplies and salaries.

Hurdles to Overcome

Since there are significant safety concerns especially with the enormous size of most ships operating in congested waters, there is a lot more testing to be done and regulations to be sorted out before we will see fully autonomous vessels operating without a crew.
Much more likely is that automated technologies will be used to reduce crews and to help the crew onboard make effective decisions.
In addition to ensuring the safety of ships, there needs to be a resolution about the regulation of our shared water.
Existing international conventions were created under the assumption a crew would be on board.
In response, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has kicked off its work to assess and update conventions to ensure safety in a new reality when AI is the captain instead of humans.

Until there is significant interest in fast-tracking research, development, and updates to regulations for autonomous ships, the industry will likely learn from the decisions made on land regarding autonomous cars and then apply that to autonomous ships.
Adoption and acceptance of autonomous cars in the coming years may put pressure on finding the same solutions for the sea.

Links :

• Yachting Monthly : Smart Navigation: From paper charts to augmented reality

The mysterious final voyage of the Alta, Ireland’s doomed ghost ship

The abandoned 'Ghost Ship' MV ALTA washed up on the Irish coast during Storm Dennis.

Alta was abandoned in October 2018 after a US Coast Guard relief operation to rescue the crew about 2,200 km (1,400 miles) south-east of Bermuda, stranded after the ship was rendered irreparably disabled on a voyage from Greece to Haiti.

The ghost ship was then sighted by HMS Protector en route to the Bahamas.

In February 2020 the ghost ship Alta ran aground on the coast near Ballycotton, County Cork amid Storm Dennis.

This footage was filmed on Tuesday 18th February 2020. Video by Youghalonline

From Wired by Matt Burgess

The MV Alta drifted in the Atlantic ocean for 18 months, before crashing into the coast of Ireland.
Tracking and current data gives us intriguing clues about its final, fateful voyage

Storm Dennis swept in from the Atlantic, its high winds and heavy rains driven by a powerful jet stream.
The extreme weather, which battered the UK and Ireland in February, flooded of thousands of homes and caused widespread travel disruption and several deaths.

In Ireland, it created a mystery.
At some point in the early hours of February 16, a ship washed up on the rocks off the village of Ballycotton in County Cork.
First spotted by a jogger out for their Sunday lunchtime run, the ship was soon making global headlines.

 photo : Irish Coast Guard

In its final resting place, the MV Alta was perched sideways on top of a series of jagged rocks, its starboard side facing inland.
The ship looks like it could fall at any moment.
The Alta, which was built in 1976, bares all the marks of years of hard work at sea.
But as it made land, the ship was empty.

The Alta, it turned out, was a ghost ship.
It had been floating around the mid-Atlantic without a soul onboard since the Autumn of 2018.
Ghost ships are not unheard of but they are rare.
The Alta is even more unusual for how long it drifted – almost 18 months in total – during which time it was battered by huge storms and shifted by strong currents.
And, during that whole time, it was only spotted once.
By chance it managed to avoid major shipping routes and other obstacles, leaving its small cargo of oil barrels intact.

 MV Alta

The ship's true owners remain unknown, although it was last sailing under the flag of Tanzania, and the vessel has changed its name four times during the last half decade.
Now ocean current analysis and analysis of data sent out by the ship's onboard Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders – a technology underpinned by GPS – have shed some light on its most likely path to Ireland.

The last recorded journey of the Alta is a long one.
Transmissions from its AIS data show the vessel was in Piraeus, a port city in Greece, in October 2017.
From here it sailed around Greece's Peloponnese peninsula before docking at the city of Kalamata in November.
The next ten months saw the Alta visiting three other Greek ports – in Piraeus, Paloukia and Salamina – around a dozen times.

Then something strange happened.
In September 2018 the vessel's AIS data showed it at the port of Ceuta, a small Spanish enclave on the north coast of Africa, more than 2,000 kilometres from the Greek ports it was last recorded at.
“It's truly a mystery ship,” says Georgios Hatzimanolis, an analyst at ship tracking website MarineTraffic, one of several firms to have looked at AIS data of the vessel.

“Since August 2015 it has been switching [AIS] on and off sporadically while making some really strange trips,” Hatzimanolis says.
“One from Genoa to Athens and then it switched it off again for a year and a half, then switched it back.” Hatzimanolis says this is “not normal behaviour” – nor is it normal for a ship to change its name and flag so regularly, he adds.

These strange patterns repeated until the Alta reached Ceuta.
It was at this point that the ship headed for open waters on its fateful final, manned, journey.
It was destined for Haiti.
It ended up in Ireland.

The animation above, produced by analysts at Spire Maritime, shows what happened to the Alta.
It left the Strait of Gibraltar in September 2018, before moving into the Atlantic.
“They have the speed going through the Atlantic,” says Max Abouchar, an engineer at Spire.
When the red line of travel turns white, this is the moment the ship slowed down.

“Somewhere, almost mid-Atlantic they suddenly just stop,” Abouchar says.
The period shown in the animation covers September to October 2018.
When the ship slowed down it is predicted to have been travelling at speeds of around 0.1 or 0.2 knots, which equates to around 0.2 to 0.3 kilometres per hour.
Put bluntly: it was barely moving at all.
“They drifted around a bit, probably just by the currents.
Then they move a little bit quicker, especially East, towards in the direction of Africa.” Abouchar, who uses Spire's data gathered by satellites to monitor currents, says these looped movements are unlikely to just be the sea moving the ship around.

Instead, he speculates, the vessel was either trying to move under its own power or that it was being towed by another vessel.
“Whatever was towing it or driving it gave up after a while,” Abouchar says.

It was around this time that US authorities became involved with the Alta.
In October 2018, the USCGC Confidence, a coastguard ship, is reported to have rescued ten crew from the vessel.
At the time GCaptain reported that the seafarers were stranded on the boat that was around 1,300 miles southeast of Bermuda.
They had been stuck on the ship for 20 days and had received a food supply, dropped by a coast guard plane, on October 2.

“We were conducting a law enforcement patrol near Puerto Rico when we were assigned to assist the crew of the motor vessel Alta,” Confidence commander Travis Emge told GCaptain.
“We traveled over 1,300 nautical miles to get to the disabled ship.” The coast guard said the crew were being taken to Puerto Rico and the ship's owners were being contacted so Alta could be towed back to shore.
But this never happened.

“Maritime is a really low margin commercial endeavour,” says Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a non-profit which campaigns for better GPS security.
“Except for the cruise line industry, there's not a lot of extra money floating around.
“Actually getting a hold of a real person by the collar and saying, 'come and get your ship' can be a challenge.”

No available data has been able to track the Alta's exact route through the Atlantic to Ireland.
Once the its AIS stopped transmitting – most likely due to it being abandoned – it became far harder to monitor the ship's movements.

While the Alta looks huge when it's nestled against the coast of Ballycotton, in the middle of thousands of miles of Atlantic it's a tiny dot.
Tracking ships that aren't transmitting AIS data is virtually impossible.
“There's certainly nothing off the shelf that I can think of that could provide that kind of long term tracking and warning of other vessels,” Goward says.
“You could hook up an AIS unit with a battery and put it there.
But that would only last a couple of weeks.”

Vessels that disable AIS on purpose are almost always operating illegally.
At the start of 2018, the European Commission opened an investigation into two vessels believe to be turning off their AIS transponders to fish illegally.
On the high seas, so-called dark ships are a big problem.

The US Navy is looking for a way to fix this.
It has issued a tenderfor technology companies to produce a system that can help it “more clearly mark objects in water”.
But that's come too late to help people trace how the Alta reached Ireland.

Previous reports speculate that the Alta may have drifted up the coast of Africa towards the UK and its final resting place.
Abouchar doesn't believe this to be the case.
“It would be against all currents and they would have met quite a bit of traffic,” he explains.
Where the Alta stopped transmitting AIS data is roughly near the centre of where currents in the Atlantic circulate.

During all its months at the mercy of the Atlantic the ghost ship was only spotted once – by the British Royal Navy.
On September 2, 2019, almost a year after its crew were rescued, staff aboard the HMS Protector tweeted they had discovered the Alta in a “strange event”.
The crew put the call out asking if it required any help, but no response was received.

The HMS Protector didn't state its location but analysts looking at its movements say a day after the social media post it was in Bermuda – around 1,300 miles from the last known location of the Alta.
In the grand scale of the ocean, this isn't that far from Canada and Newfoundland.

Ocean current data collected from Spire's satellites and modelling – shown above – gives a clue of how the Alta ended up in Europe.
The animation above shows how currents were moving in the months before the vessel was grounded.
Each arrow shows the direction currents were flowing, with the red overlays demonstrating faster moving streams.
All arrows point to Ireland.

“If you started up North, near Canada and Newfoundland, you would catch a major current stream heading from there and that would have definitely washed you up at Ireland,” Abouchar says.
“It would take quite a while to move the distance it did, until it reached that stream up by Newfoundland.
That's going at one or two knots.”

Despite the slow speed, there was plenty of time between the Alta being seeing by the Royal Navy to the final crossing of the Atlantic.
“With the oceans behaving as they do, if the ship didn't have anyone on it, it would have followed the ocean path and eventually ended up somewhere around the UK or British Isles area,” Abouchar adds.

 Ballycotton Bay with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO nautical map)

The MV Alta on the coast of Ireland on March 15, as seen by satellite

Planet Labs Inc

When it finally ran aground in Ireland one member of the local coastguard said it was a “one in a million” chance.
More than a month after it marooned, the Alta remains in the same position.
Ireland's revenue commissioners have become the “receiver of wreck” as a result of it running aground on Irish land.
A person who is believed to be connected to the ship's owner made contact with authorities, but no action has been taken.
"The council continues to liaise with Revenue regarding ownership of the vessel," a spokesperson for Cork County Council says.

The local authorities have scrambling to make the wreckage safe.
A group of teenagers boarded the ship one night.
They recorded a haunting video from inside the vessel, where debris has been thrown around by the power of the ocean.

Officials have airlifted 95 oil barrels from the boat – 62 of these were full.
"The council is engaged with relevant experts to assess whether there are any residual environmental or ecological risks posed by the vessel," a spokesperson for the council says.
Absorbent pads have also been placed around pipes on the vessel that may contain oil.
To stop anyone else boarding the Alta engineers have removed the ship's ladders and closed off all access points.

“It's bad that the Alta came ashore on the Irish coast,” Goward says.
“But it could have been a lot worse: it could have strayed into a traffic lane or the English Channel and someone could have rammed right into it, sunk, and could have had a major loss in life or more of a significant pollution incident.
At least in this instance it was controllable.”

Links :

• TheJournal IE : Coast Guard warned ghost ship could be 'pilfered' and urged Council to provide security
• The Guardian : Irish contractors get first look at grounded 'ghost ship' MV Alta
• The Irish Time : Efforts ongoing to prevent pollution from MV Alta wreck / MV Alta: The unmanned voyage of the Ballycotton 'ghost ship'
• Irish Examiner : Inside MV Alta: The ghost cargo ship which lies on the rocks in Ballycotton / Helicopters may be used to remove oil containers from ghost ship

Danton tears

Hit on 19 March 1917 by two torpedoes fired by the German submarine U64, the battleship Danton took nearly two thirds of the men on board with it.

Discovered in 2008 in the south of Sardinia, the wreck of this vessel lies in 1025 m of water.

Travel to the heart of this emblematic event of the First World War. 
Shipwreck localization with the GeoGarage platform (SHOM nautical chart) 

Links :

• BBC : Danton wreck found in deep water
• DRASM : L'épave du cuirassé français Danton (1909-1917)

Saildrone's teaching modules bring Antarctica to your home school

From Hydro

In many countries schools are closed and parents have to teach their children themselves.
To help them a bit, Saildrone has put together a free teaching package.
The US-based company designs and manufactures wind and solar-powered autonomous surface vehicles called saildrones.

On its website, the company writes: "In this unprecedented time, many parents, including those at Saildrone, are now finding themselves not only working from home, but also with a new side gig: Teacher.
Saildrone is proud to share a series of fun and engaging educational tools inspired by our autonomous vehicles and developed to bring the mysteries of Antarctica to students around the world."


Antarctic Mission

Saildrone has developed three modules as part of the Antarctic mission and a link to access the individual lesson plans.
Each lesson includes a class presentation, activities, and printable visual aids.
Teaching notes are also included to help guide teachers—and parents—through each lesson.
All materials are free—no registration required. (Download here).

So, if you like to explore the Southern Ocean with your kids—these fun and engaging STEM-oriented lesson plans discuss the incredible aspects of the Antarctic ecosystem and how it affects the rest of the planet.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Saildrone forecast takes a data-driven ... / The new ocean explorers