Blue Seas Protection is a Registered UK Charity (no.1189529) that was inspired by Captain Garry Oates & his father Captain Silas Oates after lifetimes at sea as professional divers and ocean salvage tug owners
During this time they saw many "Crimes at Sea" that many of us will never see & in the 80s donated a boat to Greenpeace that became known as "Rainbow Warrior." Among these "Crimes at Sea," one of the worst crimes is the state of the commercial fishing industry which has overfished & decimated the world's oceans of 90% of fish. Captain Oates often tells the story of how he watched a 30mile long shoal of mackerel, which had spawned at the same place at the same time for generations in the English Channel, be fished to extinction within a few years after the invention of the midwater trawl. Commercial fishing not only decimates shoals but also decimates the species that live and depend on the shoals and ultimately their associated food chains and ecosystems. Bycatch such as dolphin, whale, ray, and turtles is illegal to keep & so is thrown back, mutilated or dead into the sea. Fins are cut off of healthy animals which are thrown back limbless to drown for the shark fin soup industry. As a professional diver, he has seen the vast scale of lost and abandoned nets "ghost fishing" the seas. "Stretched out like a carpet of white bones" with millions of creatures killed in just one net. Since the 1950s nets have been made of nylon & do not biodegrade & so continue to trap fish and other marine life forever. Norway trawled its coastline on an experimental basis and retrieved 320km of this net. The UN allows nets to be up to 2.5km long each legally by international law. BSP has been campaigning to have these nets reduced in size, trackable & biodegradable since 2017. We support the IPNLF which promotes the use of line fishing by hand by individuals. Although less cost-effective this not only provides jobs and income for communities it avoids bycatch & ghost nets altogether. In 2018 it was estimated that one in 4 fish contained plastic and that by 2050 there would be more plastic in the sea than fish. At that time, the UK was exporting household waste including plastic and recyclables to Malaysia and China which was then dumped straight into the sea which has ended up in gyres, inside marine animals, sunk to the ocean floor & spat back onto land, on the beach, by the ocean. Today (2021) as well as finding plastic 7 miles down in the Mariana trench & in the furthest reaches of both poles, plastic has been found both in human faeces and human placenta. Plainly, something must be done now to mitigate Mankinds destructive actions & influence. 50 years ago we had "ignorance" as an excuse. Nobody realised what we were doing to our planet. We had tupperware parties. There are no excuses...
Captain Oates, in retirement, now devotes his time & energy & attention 24/7 to addressing these Crimes in our Oceans through this charity which he founded. We are a charity that acts for the public benefit & our marine life. Your donation will help. Thank you. https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=CE8Q4TCHKBFY2
