The vast blue waters of the Pacific bustle every day with numerous cargo ships, fishing vessels, oil tankers, research ships and pleasure craft. They come and go, pursuing business and recreation.

While most mariners making their living on the sea do so through legal means, there also are instances of labor abuse and vessels flouting environmental regulations, such as illegally dumping harmful waste. Others use apparently legal activity as a cover for drug smuggling, gunrunning and other crimes.

At a meeting last month of leaders of the United States, Australia, Japan and India, the four countries — known as “the Quad” — signed an agreement to launch the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness with the goal of shining a light on illegal fishing and “dark shipping.”

The agreement lays the groundwork for more information sharing between the countries along with plans for a network of new high-tech sensors and satellites to track and document vast stretches of the Pacific and Indian oceans. While they’re on the lookout for crime at sea, unspoken is an increasing interest in monitoring clandestine military and espionage activities hiding in plain sight.

Neither the Coast Guard nor U.S. Indo-Pacific Command responded to Honolulu Star-Advertiser questions about how the Quad agreement will change their missions going forward. But Tony Long, a former British naval officer who now serves as the CEO of Global Fishing Watch, an organization that tracks illegal fishing activity, called the initiative “potentially huge.”

In 2020 the Coast Guard said that illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing — or IUU — had surpassed piracy as the greatest global security threat on the high seas. The service warned that rampant overfishing caused environmental and economic devastation to coastal communities that depend on fishing for food and employment.

Violent confrontations over dwindling fish stocks have been on the rise globally, potentially risking international conflicts between seagoing nations.

Chasing dark ships

“I don’t think most people really appreciate how big the ocean really is,” said Ethan Allen, a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia- Pacific Center for Security Studies in Waikiki. “When you’re in the middle of open ocean you’re really accountable to almost no one.”

Much of the data available on the movement of ships at sea as well as international fishing activity comes from trackers called automatic identification systems.

“AIS is normally used for avoidance of collision at sea, but because it’s a global system and it’s open … it becomes very useful for tracking vessels for other reasons,” Long said.

Global Fishing Watch has been able to track vessels that linger in fishing grounds for extended periods and make unauthorized handoffs to large industrial refrigerator ships called “reefers” that take massive hauls back to port. But while the availability of these trackers has in some ways been a game changer, authorities and researchers can’t always rely on AIS.

“They can turn those off,” said Allen. “Once they do that the ship has gone dark, basically. They are not as easily track-able.”

But researchers have found other ways, such as employing satellites to watch the ocean. Satellites have found groups of illegal fishing boats at night by tracking their lights and other indicators at sea. Regional coast guards and navies have taken a keen interest in these new technologies.

Close to home

In early 2020 the Coast Guard reported finding multiple foreign vessels illegally fishing in the exclusive economic zones of Guam and Hawaii.

Officials from the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement declined requests for interviews and would not offer details about the vessels. But documents obtained by the Star-Advertiser through the Freedom of Information Act provide insight into at least one incident.

On Feb. 5, 2020, Coast Guard Sector Guam’s vessel- monitoring system and AIS picked up potential foreign fishing activity within the island’s exclusive economic zone. The following day a Barbers Point-based Coast Guard HC-130 went to search the waters.

The plane’s crew spotted several foreign fishing vessels within the zone, including the Taiwanese-flagged tuna longliner Shui Ho Cheng No. 8. As the plane flew over, its crew spotted someone hastily trying to reel in one of two nets in the water.

In an account of the mission, the plane’s co-pilot wrote that “additionally, utilizing the aircraft search radar, we located the Shui Ho Cheng No. 6. … The vessel was transiting eastward at 6 knots and was not transmitting on AIS.”

A Coast Guard intelligence officer on Guam wrote that Shui Ho Cheng No. 8 turned off its trackers after it was spotted by the plane and was not seen again until about seven hours later. The officer also said the vessel “manipulated its AIS signature” to come up under a different name while it was on the high seas.

Fish wars

In October 2020, after the Coast Guard declared IUU fishing the world’s No. 1 maritime security threat, the service announced it would launch a study into permanently basing a new fast response cutter in American Samoa and expand its presence on Guam. Last year the Coast Guard stationed three new cutters on Guam.

The Hawaii Longline Association has alleged that local fishermen are reporting increasingly aggressive interactions with foreign vessels around the islands, particularly Chinese ones. Among the world’s fishing fleets, China’s has the most documented violations. With Chinese fisheries increasingly depleted to meet high demand for fish, Chinese fleets operate globally.

“The Chinese have the biggest fleet in the world so by dint of sheer ratio anything that they are doing badly will have a greater impact on the ocean,” Long said.

Recently, in addition to satisfying its domestic needs, China has started exporting its enormous global catch. This month, fishermen in the Philippines who have been pushed out of their traditional fishing grounds by Chinese warships and fishing vessels protested imports of seafood from China.

But it’s not just about fish. The leaders of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard have alleged that China “deploys a multilayered fleet” that includes “naval auxiliaries disguised as civilian vessels.” These so-called maritime militias have been used to stake out disputed territories and conduct surveillance missions in support of China’s conventional navy.

Transparency

While tracking Chinese vessels is understood to be the main focus of the Quad’s new effort, Long said it shouldn’t be the exclusive focus.

“I would hope that this would be applied across the region,” he said. “Of course, China will be seen within that structure but we should also, hopefully, see many other fleets exposed through the use of the technology.”

He said the Quad countries should share their findings with the public, not just one another.

“This has to be public information,” Long said. “If we can bring this information out into the public it’s not only good for enforcement, it’s also good for research and policy work to understand exactly who’s operating where.”

But even solid documenting of crime at sea can fall short of the mark for bringing scofflaws to justice. Among the snags: A vessel’s owner, operator and crew are often entirely different entities — sometimes spread across different continents.

Allen pointed out that the ownership chain of a ship can be “very obscure and nontransparent, and it’s very difficult sometimes to find out who is using a particular vessel for a particular purpose.” He added, “It’s not a system that’s conducive to accountability in any real sense.”

Some companies in maritime industries use “flags of convenience” — registering the ship to a country other than their own — to flout regulations or hide its true owners.

Even so, there are potential enforcement mechanisms. The Port State Measures Agreement, established in 2009, gives ports around the world the authority to impound, inspect or turn away any ship suspected of illegal fishing. However, some ports are known for bribery practices or are simply unable to access up-to-date information on what’s coming in and going out.

“We’ve got a very broken governance system,” Long said. “We’ve got an incomplete enforcement system, and somehow we’ve got to take some steps forward. … If we’re going to bring coast guards and patrol vessels together at sea, it needs the political will to follow up on what they find.”