Lawless Longliners | Lawless Oceans

KARSTEN VON HOESSLIN: At this stage, I'd love to board a working Taiwanese longliner to see what they make of the murder videos. But they rarely come into Port Victoria, and they're not exactly keen to talk. Instead, I've been invited onto a local longliner. It's smaller than the Taiwanese ships. How's it going, gentlemen?

But catches fish in the same way. Captain, how are you? I'm fine, thank you. Good, very good to see. Longliners are named after the long, thin line that often stretches 60 miles behind them. There are thousands of hooks spaced at intervals down the line. But each fish has to be reeled in by hand one at a time. The catch on these local longliners is closely monitored.

But the foreign boats seem to play by different rules. How much control, realistically, do you think the Seychelles has over those boats? Do they even ever come into Port Victoria, or do they just stay out there and do what they want? I believe a lot of these boats are flagged and licensed without even calling in Port Victoria. The observers in the ports will never know what's really being fished.

• They will never know, exactly. You don't get access to the logbooks to know of their movements, the catch per day, hooks being set per day. And you don't know what's happening. You hear that they are offloading in whatever port. And there has to be tons of illegal activities going on.

KARSTEN VON HOESSLIN: Commercial fishing boats are always meant to register their catch, to check it conforms with their quotas. But by transshipping their load to another boat, they can escape detection. Their catch gets mixed up with legally caught fish and appears legitimate. This is known as fish laundering, and it cost the global economy billions of dollars a year. Our economies, our livelihoods, and our food all depend on our oceans. Illegal fishing depletes the world's fisheries.

KARSTEN VON HOESSLIN: Were the longliners from the videos into this sort of racket, fishing illegally in the Indian Ocean?