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Photo: courtesy Puntonoticias
Shrimp: Boardings and breaches between abundance and a war that seems to have resumed
ARGENTINA
Tuesday, June 15, 2021, 06:50 (GMT + 9)
The same day, almost at the same time that the relatives of the crew of the Rigel fishing boat participated in the tribute to their disappeared at the monument that remembers them, at the foot of the small shoulder, on the high seas, 40 miles from the coast , a little further south from where the fishing vessel sank that early morning of June 9, 2018, the “Derbes” of the Argentine Naval Prefecture was performing an infrequent maneuver.
Coastguard vessel GC-28 'PREFECT DERBES'
The Coast Guard boarded fishing boats with national registration while they were fishing for shrimp in the permanent hake closed zone, established a few days ago. The boats boarded were the "Gurises", the "Huafeng 821" and the "Anita Alvarez" and they were all able to continue fishing without problems, although the fact was known, from Mar del Plata they began to look for explanations.
.jpg) Julián Suárez, National Director of Fisheries Coordination and Inspection, in the moments that he had a signal on his cell phone because he was traveling along National Route 3 heading south, claimed not to know what they were telling him and reiterated that it was a unilateral decision of the Prefecture .
The shipowners were concerned about the rupture of the bubble with which they left Mar del Plata. The entry of strange personnel, due to more chinstraps, alcohol gel and distancing, could generate infections.
Before recalling that many ships that left Mar del Plata with negative swabs had to return to port with symptomatic sailors, in Prefecture they assured that the troops aboard the Coast Guard had also set sail with the corresponding swab. The shipowners chose to believe.
"They reviewed everything before we left, from top to bottom, down to the smallest detail ... you tell me what they do these antics for," a shipowner confided on Thursday afternoon while the group of WhatsApp they share was boiling.
"In principle because we can," they refuted in the Prefecture, although at the Mar del Plata headquarters they shrugged their shoulders as Suárez did from a distance. "We did not know and we did not promote it" was the phrase that was most pronounced during those hours in the local delegation.
The “Derbes” does not depend on the Mar del Plata Prefecture but on the Operations Directorate based in the Coast Guard Building. There the glances from Mar del Plata pointed. They understand that politics gets in the way and that the Prefecture responded to an order that had the sole objective of disturbing the operation of the fleet. In force they reject it. "It's routine," they say.
The series of audits that had begun since the beginning of the harvest in Camarones did nothing more than spread the hypothesis of speculations. Located south of Rawson and north of Comodoro Rivadavia, Camarones is a sleepy port most of the year. He wakes up with the start of the shrimp harvest. It does not have the dock infrastructure or the amount or speed of the stowage service available to the fleet in Mar del Plata. They can barely unload 3 ships at a time.
The wooden table arranged to empty some drawers is a synthesis of the precariousness with which one works. Stainless steel was hundreds of kilometers away. But Camarones is the port closest to the fishing area, the one that requires the least fuel to empty the hold and go back to fishing.
The pandemic and the controls that this year was promoted by Cooperation and Inspection, in addition to suspicions due to its sudden appearance, also generated some circuit breakers on the ground. The norm establishes that shrimp crates cannot weigh more than 17 kilos clean, that is, without accompanying flora and fauna.
Julián Suárez with Germán Toledo and Fran Albanesi. Photo: Twitter Julián Suárez
The stowage removes the drawers from the hold to the dock. Or almost always ... the Floridanlanca ship was thrown 4 slings of 6 boxes each into the water, about 450 kilos, or 900 dollars, whichever you like better. But the stevedores are not responsible for discarding the drawers to comply with the inspection of the heavy.
After endless conversations, negotiations, marches and countermarches thousands of kilometers away, the shipowners had no choice but to authorize the descent of two sailors per boat to fulfill this task. Again the bubble under threat and the risk of generating a subsequent outbreak.
To make matters worse after the broken bubble came the fines. Minutes were drawn up for “Huafeng 821”, “Luca Santino”, “Anita Alvarez” and “Don Santiago” from the fact that the audited boxes exceeded the 18.02 kilos limit tolerated as overweight. Later, sanctions were added to "Floridablanca", "Paola S" and "Ciudad de Huelva".
In Puerto Madryn there were also controls but no new sanctions were reported. "The boats that they sell to González are not overweight," they say in Mar del Plata. The "Mar del Chubut" and "Don Gaetano" unloaded in Madryn and on Friday they appeared on the list of those infringed.
Foto: Twitter Julián Suárez
Gonzalez is Marcelo, the benchmark of the Rawson coastal fleet chamber. In addition to being a fisherman, he has a stevedoring service and not only sells his production but also buys several boats to distribute fresh shrimp in various plants. Yesterday morning the owner, Francisco Romano, rejected those versions. Both finished with averages below 18 kilos. Unexpected miracles…
There are also controversies in the way they take excess weight. Some inspectors take two slugs at random and others average the entire load. "With boxes, if you discard, you have no way to go," say inspectors.
That's what some shipowners will do; They have already decided to change for smaller drawers so that that difference of two or three kilos that it costs to identify in the cellar is noticeable when they complete the boxes. Others claim that a system with monthly averages must be discussed to avoid these problems.
There are also those who ask to raise the tolerance by a few hundred grams when stored in drawers.
Foto: Twitter Julián Suárez
Some, not all, see a maneuver by Chubut behind the sudden presence of the inspectors to put sticks in the wheel. “During the Rawson harvest, it was a liberated zone; they were bringing more than 20 kilos ... ask Suárez for the minutes to see if he will give them to you, "muttered a shipowner.
The National Director of Fisheries Coordination and Inspection was in charge of personally monitoring all controls. In Madryn he did not have time to go to the Prefecture but he wants to ask for an explanation for the actions of the “Derbes”. "There is no intention other than to control the operation and the volume of the cargo," they say close to the national official.
Hopefully that intention also reaches Puerto Piojo where the stingray boxes far exceed 35 kilos, or the coefficient of the freezers, not to mention the reprocessing of squid on land, whose complementary minutes to inform the transfer of the cargo to the refrigerators continue shining by its absence.
All this anger, setbacks, overboard, infractions and a battle that seems to have resumed between Rawson and Mar del Plata, without anyone knowing what caused it, has as a backdrop the abundance of shrimp that gives this start of the the season. To give you an idea, there are ships of 2 thousand boxes that complete in the day. 34 tons, 68 thousand dollars gross and go back to fishing to complete again.
Foto: Twitter Julián Suárez
Perhaps it is that cause and not another that motivated the restart of the fight. A beginning that has the Mar del Plata fleet operating at full capacity and that of Rawson looking from the dock because they did not enable sub-zone 10, the closest to their port and to which they could access without problems.
Time will tell how the bid for access to the resource evolves. It will also be necessary to wait how much of that abundance ends up activating employment in Mar del Plata, diminished by the lack of hake that this fresh fleet now concentrated in red gold stopped providing.
For now, much of the fresh shrimp does not leave the province of Chubut and is reprocessed in Madryn, although a portion travels further south to generate work in Puerto Deseado. That, after all, was one of the additional objectives of Carlos Liberman when he supported this scheme to open national waters, with the fleet fishing in an area closer to the idle productive capacity in Santa Cruz.
Author: Roberto Garrone / Punto Noticias
editorial@seafood.media
www.seafood.media
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