I have been working in fisheries consulting for 22 years now, easy must have done over 200 contracts of all sorts and sizes of which 100 must have been as a part of a team 2-3 to 10 people. In most, I was the only one with commercial fishing experience, perhaps in 10 of them there where one more person with fishing experience… but never until today I been part of the team that won a bid where there are 3 ex-fisherman and one high level public officer.
appropriate tuvaluan art
It seemed really strange to me when I started consulting, that you could work in fisheries projects without having been a fisherman at some stage in your life. Yet I’m fully aware that most fishers don't have the opportunity to do university qualifications and also that good writing count in this job. Is part of the deal that could have 40 years experience finding and catching tuna, but perhaps not even high school, so you ain’t going to get win a job in the fisheries development against someone with a PhD in tropical fisheries from Northern European country or the US for example.
Anyway… I’m very happy to have landed on deck a contract with the Tuvalu Fisheries Authority (one of my favourite countries in the world). When I saw the opportunity my head went into gear as to get a team for it…but I wanted to work with realistic and operational people that I respect.
So I reached to my long term friend Robert Lee a former Skipper from Trinidad&Tobago and a fellow FAO officer with whom we worked a few times already (in Kiribati and recently on this plastic waste study). Robert has tons of experience everywhere, he know his stuff left, right and centre, has a good sense of humour and anyone that knows him will tell you is a good man.
The other fisherman is Brett (Blue) Haywood, a former NZ fisherman himself and the head of an actual tuna fishing and processing company Sea Quest Fiji Ltd (that is sleepy with covid). Blue has been in Fiji for almost 20 years now and is one of the most progressive and positive people I worked with over the years (got AIS and the 1st blockchain traceability system in this part of the world)… One thing is to be a fisherman and another one is to be good at running a fishing company, he is one of the few I know who has managed that transition well… yet more importantly for me, he is a good man (when friends got stuck in Fiji at the beginning of the covid debacle, he opened his house at no cost for them, just because they were my friends… in my books that stuff has no price, and I will always be thankful to him for that)
Then is Taukelina Finikaso, whom I had only meet briefly before, and to be honest when you look at his CV your jaw drops. Former attorney general, former parliamentarian, former ambassador, former minister… as most Tuvaluan I worked with, extremely well prepared yet very approachable and with a good sense of humour… unbeatable combination.
In my experience, working with good people counts more and more for me as I get older, the other thing I really liked is that we all earn the same daily fee… that was very important for me and I’m stoked that we all are at the same level.
The job is a challenging one since it has been tried in many places before and didn't always work… is to set a course for the development of a viable and sustainable domestic tuna longline fishery operating in Tuvalu’s EEZ, with focus on providing analyses and recommendations on the operational sustainability of appropriately sized longline vessels but also the potential for the usage of regional ports since Tuvalu’s own is not really set up for maintenance, operational and freight logistics just to name few.
So yeah that is the challenge… which to me sound like a job for 3 fisherman and a high-level public officer.
a pity is a desktop job… i love going to work in Tuvalu