Current Sea

My name is Matt Blomberg,

I'm a investigative journalist in Cambodia.

Four years ago, I was a sports reporter in Australia.

That was my goal in life,

and then I came here on a holiday.

I didn't want to go home,

so I applied for a job at The Cambodia Daily.

There's not much professional sport here, so

I got sucked into the world of

corruption and investigation and scandal.

There's a lot of different people

using a lot of different methods to try and confront

injustices all over the world.

For me, the most effective way is with a pen and a camera.

From Phnom Penh I was following the story about illegal fishing

and starting to get little bits of stories

about the lawlessness at sea.

And then one day

I heard that a Cambodian man was killed

in a clash of Vietnamese fishermen.

To where?

Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah for sure.

So I went down and visited the village,

met the widow,

Then started, you know,

poking around the villages and asking questions.

- Was there any justice for the death of Auok?

- The governors think they are wrong.

- At this point, I hadn't seen anything myself.

So I went and asked the captain to take me out.

It's a really volatile situation

because there's so many fishing villages

who are all living off the same patch of ocean.

There's hundreds of boats that go out every night.

There's these fishing communities all along the coast.

The scale is massive.

He says that all these

boats with their lights off are Vietnamese and that,

this is Cambodian water for a little bit more.

So that's everything off the sea floor.

Everything.

I watched them drag hundreds of kilos worth of sea life

onto the boat.

20% of it is put into buckets

that are going to be sold at market later

and then the rest of it,

the stuff that wasn't worth any money, just died.

Their yields are down exponentially every year.

The yields are dropping and dropping and dropping.

It's a race to the bottom.

The more villages I went to,

I just kept hearing the same story.

There's no fish left,

that the Vietnamese had taken all the fish

and that the local fishermen are powerless to stop them.

If you have a look at the maps, you can see that

Thailand in the west and Vietnam in the east,

their waters have been fished out.

The Vietnamese have pillaged their own oceans and

the fishing fleets from there are moving into Cambodia.

There's billions of dollars worth of seafood

exported from Southeast Asia every year.

And so, a lot of people around the world

are affected by the things that happen here.

In Cambodia, things are pretty desperate.

It became apparent very quickly how serious this issue is.

If this problem is not addressed, it's only a matter

of time before there's no fisheries in Cambodia at all.

Hundreds of thousands of people's

livelihoods are on the line.

Through talking to the fishermen down there,

I found out about

this vigilante British guy who was living on an island

off the coast and

doing his best to try and keep the illegal fishers at bay.

So, I'm thinking to myself,

"Who is this guy Paul?"

- At least one set of Vietnamese pair trawlers,

First one,

somewhere between 500 meters and 1 kilometre

north of Koh Seh. Now we...

- Paul's strategy is to flood Facebook with

live streams when he's out on patrol.

- Oh there he is, throwing stuff!

Live on Facebook! Here we go, chasing the boat.

90% of Cambodians

see Facebook as their lead source of information.

And he knows that pretty high ranking people are watching,

- Okay here we are, continuous offenders.

- And that if he keeps slapping them in the face

someone will react eventually.

Guy's waving an axe at us.

- The illegal fishermen are notoriously violent.

They go to work armed with machetes and slingshots

and homemade guns and anyone who gets in their way,

they're willing to use those weapons.

They've rammed boats, they've sunk boats,

they've launched coordinated attacks even.

- 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 electric trawlers

trying to ram our boat right now.

- Obviously I was quite interested in it,

so I went down there looking for him.

I also heard that Paul

wasn't very keen on talking to the media.

His staff told me, you know, he doesn't like journalists.

The small one has all the cameras and some stuff in it.

How're you doing, Paul?

My first impression was that

getting along with Paul will be difficult.

What I wanted to do

was to get into a position where we can share information.

Nothing else to do.

But it took me a little while

to even gain his attention.

- I approached him and sat down and

slowly started chatting to him.

No, it's okay. We've done all the

research we've been doing it first...

And I guess I won his trust in the end.

At the end, at the end.

Yeah, yeah. It was like, that was exactly...

- At the very beginning when these little seahorse trawlers

came over from Vietnam,

this was what the bycatch looked like.

So it was a really, really sensitive habitats

that hadn't been disturbed.

So you've got, that's a, say a 30 minute trawl,

and they have that much life in it.

This is exact, almost the same trawler

and that's what they catch now.

So the first one was, I think 2008,

so they get, and that will be maybe a two hour trawl.

It's pretty crazy how little there is now left.

But I've got to say,

the Vietnamese ones must be working hard..

Matt contacted me

and I gave him a bit of information about things

and we talked and it sort of progressed from there.

The other and he's like,

"If I had this and if I had this..."

Twelve years ago, I was a diver,

I loved the ocean and I came to Cambodia

to work as a dive instructor.

It was a very small island.

Just off the coast of Sihanoukville, called Koh Koun.

When the ocean started being destroyed,

no one else was there to stop it

and I was there.

There wasn't really a choice, it had to be done.

So, that was when I started Marine Conservation Cambodia.

- We started out to protect the seahorses here

and the more we started to work with the community,

the more we understood how little fish were left

and it became much more about

protecting the community and the whole marine environment.

We worked on getting the illegal sand dredging banned.

We ran a clinic.

We ran a small English school, for the local kids.

It was very successful.

And the deputy governor

basically asked if we were interested in doing,

in the ocean here in Kep,

exactly what we'd done there.

And so, we set up MCC here in Kep,

and then we began work.

- MCC has a very small area in front of Koh Seh,

the island that they populate.

We have the conservation area

that we've officially been granted

by the provincial government.

- And it's surrounded on three sides by Vietnam.

Essentially we really are

smack bang on the front line.

- This is the border, right here,

between Cambodia and Vietnam.

This is our medium boat.

This is the boat that we go patrolling on.

Phon is the captain on the boat.

We run the patrols

to stop the trawling boats

from going into the marine conservation areas.

Three electric boats,

Clearly know they're in the wrong.

They're running from our boat right now.

- They also have an extensive research program

that follows the seahorse populations in the area.

MCC is a really grassroots operation.

Y'know they're all living on a thread out there.

For Paul, every time he wakes up in the morning,

he's risking everything.

'Cause he's got his family, he's got five kids and a wife

living on that small island with him.

- Hello everybody. - Hello everybody.

- So can you give us hundreds of money, all your moneys.

- You guys love being live, don't you?

- Papa I want to say something too.

- What do you want to say? What'd you want to say?

- Whoever is watching me right now,

please help me to save this island and this ocean.