My Longliner Trip

I had a really fantastic time on the longliner. I was out with Jude, who’s doing her PhD on toothfish and we got on really well which was good! We caught a lot of toothfish and tagged eight of them. We also saw some birds I haven’t seen before and a lot of whales. It was really interesting to see how longlining works, and it was really great to see the big toothfish as it was toothfish which were the fish that got me interested in the Falklands first of all.

Most of my time was spent standing outside watching the setting and hauling of the line. It is pretty cold at this time of year and when it was really bad I got to wear such cool and stylish clothes as these:
I did still get to go and work with the fish occasionally. The fish were much bigger than I’m used to working with, with some reaching almost 190 cm in length. It can be quite difficult to get a sense of perspective from a photo so when we caught a lot of particularly big fish I got into the fish bin to give provide a scale.

We saw some birds I haven’t seen before, including sooty albatrosses:

And arctic skuas:
We were really surprised about the arctic skua but it turns out then do come down to the southern hemisphere.

While the birds were good, I was more excited about seeing whales. Sperm whales are renowned for hanging around longliners and are known to take toothfish off the line. We spent two weeks in the south where we saw a few whales but when we went to the north we started seeing lots. By the time we left we had more than we could count with at least nine around at a time, which was quite incredible.

The problem with sperm whales is that apart from the tail they are not particularly photogenic. They have small fins and their heads and blow-hole are undeniably bum-like!

When the sun was shining the blow would sometime catch the light and it was quite beautiful.


While seeing them on the surface was great, seeing them dive was amazing. They would often change direction a few minutes before diving and would then do several breaths where they really lifted their head out of the water then they would arch their back and then dive, lifting their tail out of the water.

While it was fantastic to see the sperm whales, and so many (and for free!) seeing the killer whales was really amazing, if only because they seemed to cause the sperm whales to congregate in even larger numbers than normal.

There was only one pod of killer whales which is known to live in the area we were fishing for the last week or so. I’ve never seen killer whales in the flesh before and was really surprised by how small they were and how tall their dorsal fins were.

Jude told me that the males had even taller dorsal fins but I didn’t realise how much taller they were until I saw one.

Having seen sperm whales and killer whales, as well as long-finned pilot whales and hourglass dolphins, we couldn’t really ask for more. But we got more anyway. One day, just as we had finished lunch we got a call from the bridge to say there was a whale around. We rushed to the bridge with out cameras to findy a southern right whale swimming around our boat. It stayed around us for a good two hours or so and was absolutely incredible.

They have really bowed heads and calluses. They have two nostrils which gives them two blows. The one around us (which the captain nicknamed Toby!) kept doing several small dives where it didn’t really reveal the tail, but then it would do a longer dive where it would show its tail. It was amazing!
I could put up loads more photos but I will spare you! As you can hopefully tell I had a really incredible time on this trip and learned a lot about cetacean behaviour. It was a great experience and one not normally available to fisheries observers so I feel very lucky. Now all that’s left is to write my report and try and formally identify all those whales!