Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Poaching in Argentina

Squid fishing turns into an international incident back in February 2005:

A Taiwanese flagged jigger allegedly poaching in the South Atlantic was arrested by the Argentine Coast Guard after intimidating fire. This is the second incident in a week.

According to Argentine sources the 35 crew jigger was detected operating in the Isla Rasa area, 199 miles offshore Comodoro Rivadavia, and refused to stop engines when approached by a Coast Guard vessel.

Primary reports indicate that “Chich Man 1” was transporting 3,700 boxes of 12,5 kilos each of frozen squid, plus another 68 of fresh squid stored on deck.

When the jigger instead of obeying orders tried to flee the Argentine Coast Guard vessel fired intimidating shots. She was then boarded by a party of Argentine sailors and is currently being escorted to Comodoro Rivadavia where the captain will face charges of illegal fishing.

Less that a week ago another Taiwanese jigger, “Hsien Hua 6” was caught red-hand poaching in the same area and was by ARA Guerrico and escorted to Puerto Deseado.

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Posted on March 17, 2006 at 3:32 PM • 8 Comments

Comments

Froogal • March 18, 2006 1:14 PM

Isn’t the South Atlantic a rather large body of water in which to be poaching? I usually stick to a mere pot of water and a couple of hen’s eggs.

Xeelee • March 19, 2006 12:49 PM

The problem with asian fishing ships it’s actually growing. Sometimes they pretty much invade other countries’ continental waters and poach anything they can, including squid 😛

As for a risk for them, it just depends on the country. Argentina has a strong navy – remember their war with the UK over the Falklands – and they use it. Most other countries don’t have that resource, and the poachers have a free run on resources that oficially don’t belong to them.

Ed T. • March 20, 2006 7:28 AM

199 miles offshore, eh? Sounds to me like we might have a bit of a difference of opinion between Argentina and the Taiwanese over how far out the boundaries between national and international waters lie. Or, someone’s GPS wasn’t all that accurate (maybe the US Govt lowered the accuracy as part of the “war on Terror”.)

~EdT.

David Donahue • March 21, 2006 11:56 AM

FRoogle said: “Isn’t the South Atlantic a rather large body of water in which to be poaching? ”

Well I did the math: If you were to use the whole Atlantic ocean to poach (a lot of) eggs, assuming you boiled it (could also be used to boil Squid) it would require:

Number of liters of water in the Atlantic (per wikipedia) not counting attached seas: 323,600,000,000,000,000 {323,600,000 Cubic Kilometers}
Times the specific heat of Water: 4,190
Times the temperature difference between the Atlantic’s approx average temp and boiling water in Celsius (100-8=92)
Equals 1.25E+23 Jules/Sec of energy necessary to bring it to a boil.

Of course then you get to add the eggs and have to deal with the complaining fisherman who were also in your pot.

Someday I’ll bother calculating the number of 100Mton Atomic bombs that would take, but for now, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader…

B-Rad • April 26, 2006 10:07 AM

ya your site sucks ass i think that you should let people do what they wantd if they want ta shot animals after dark then i say go for it

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