Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior visits Monterey Bay.

Greenpeace’s environmental campaigning ship Rainbow Warrior made a friendly visit to Monterey this morning en route from San Francisco to San Diego, where it will finish its west coast tour that also included Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.

Moored alongside the Coast Guard Pier, the boat’s campaigners welcomed researchers from the Aquarium and MBARI—with whom Greenpeace sometimes works with on sustainable seafood campaigns—onboard for a tour and meet and greet. “We thought it’d be nice to stop and pay our respects at the Aquarium,” says Greenpeace Senior Markets Campaigner Casson Trenor.  

By 11am, the boat departed for San Diego, where Trenor hopes to raise awareness about the destructive skipjack tuna fishing practices of Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea, two canned tuna companies that are based in San Diego.

“We’re going to make some noise about the reality of the sourcing,” Trenor says, whose sustainable seafood chops include authoring a book on sustainable sushi and opening the world’s first sustainable sushi restaurant, Tataki Sushi, in San Francisco in 2008.

The problem, he says, relates their use of fish aggregating devices (FAD), which are “big floating objects with a radio beacon” that the fish are attracted to. “They basically create their own ecosystem under them.

“Then, the boat just comes back with a net and takes the whole thing,” Trenor says.

“Shark, rays, turtles. The death rate approaches 100 percent. Because of the weight, they get crushed. I’ve actually been on one of these boats, and there’s literally blood pouring out of the net.

“We’re trying to raise awareness, with Starkist as well,” he says, referring to another canned tuna company. “There are ways to do it that vastly decreases the impact.”