Tuna farmer: Sea Shepherd action cost us €1 million

The owner of the tuna farming company whose boat was involved in skirmish with conservationists Sea Shepherd in Libyan waters yesterday, claims the anti-poaching group are “people paid by oil companies". Joseph Caruana, the owner of Fish and Fish, claims the direct action by Sea Shepherd, which is out at sea monitoring tuna ranchers, says it was meant to “divert attention from damages caused by BP’s Gulf oil spill in Louisiana.”

Caruana has told MaltaToday that damages from the action by Sea Shepherd, whose divers managed to free 800 Bluefin tuna from a floating cage that one of its vessels was towing, amount to over €1 million. The damages, Caruana said, include damages to the cage and a boat which caught fire from flares thrown by the crew of the Steve Irwin, the boat being captained by Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd.

The government has now pledged the assistance of the Armed Forces of Malta to accompany tuna ranchers as they bring ashore their catches.

Video taken by Sea Shepherd (no audio)

Caruana said the Libyan authorities did not intervene when asked to assist them on Thursday morning. The two boats, the Cesare Rustica and its support vessel Rosaria Tuna, were transporting tuna which they claim was caught on 14 June – the last day of the tuna fishing season.

While Sea Shepherd’s Paul Watson says the Steve Irwin crewmembers threw “8 litres of rotten butter” at the tuna fishermen, Caruana is claiming they threw “ammonia… glass bottles filled with something smelling foul”. Caruana also said he was not if they had really been fired rubber bullets at: “Something was fired for sure because of the distance…”

Reuben Silvio, a diver working onboard the support vessel Rosaria Tuna, was injured when members of Steve Irwin “attempted to hook up and damage the tuna-pen under tow,” the Armed Forces of Malta said in a statement. Another diver, Joe Barry, was also injured.

Sea Shepherd are disputing these claims. “No one on the Steve Irwin, in the helicopter, or in the Delta saw any incident where a fisherman was injured. We saw one man dive into the water from the side of the cage. Then, we saw him get up and give us the rude Italian arm signal. Another fisherman slashed at the crew with a hook on the end of a long pole, and one of the vessels rammed us in the port stern area,” Captain Paul Watson said.

Watson claims that since 14 June was the last day of legal fishing, and the recent weather conditions for the last two days had made fishing virtually impossible, “the position of the cages only 40 miles off the Libyan coast, when they should have been moving 25 miles a day, suggested to us that the fish were freshly caught within the last three days at the most.”

At 4pm, a five-person dive crew entered one of two cages being towed by the Italian fishing vessel Cesare Rustico. “Once it was clearly established that the cage was overstocked and that a high percentage were juveniles, Sea Shepherd divers freed the 700-800 tuna."