2025 update and Indian Ocean trials

Throughout the last couple of years, the Hookpod Team have been keeping a focus on progressing uptake of the Hookpod in global fisheries. This post outlines some of this work to bring you up to date!

We've been busy...

• working with a major fleet in the Indian Ocean to trial Hookpods for the largest global tuna supplier, Thai Union.
  
• approached by the Hawaiian fishery expressing interest in conducting trials in their longline fleet to enable daylight line setting.
  
• celebrating the continued development of  international regulations in favour of the Hookpod, with the prospect of ICCAT (International Convention on the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas) adopting the Hookpod as a standalone measure. 
• witnessing continued and indeed increased use of Hookpods in New Zealand coupled with legal reform.
• progressing throughout 2024 to secure reliable manufacturing production in the UK with facilities now based with Fishtek Marine in  Devon.

Over the next few months we will be updating you on all of these developments. 

For now, here's a little more on our work in the Indian Ocean.

This long-awaited commercial trial commenced in May 2024 on twelve longliners after we deployed a team to Mauritius to train crew and skippers and engage with the owners and Thai Union representatives. This trip and the attitudes of managers and seafood procurement teams put into perspective how tantalisingly close we are to widespread adoption and commercial sustainability.

Thai Union are the single largest buyer of tuna in the world and by our calculations represent in excess of 20% of the global tuna market. As such they are an absolutely key player and adoption by them will be a gamechanger. They do not own any longliners, but their purchasing power is immense and boats in Mauritius only supply their fish to Thai Union.

The motivation for trialing Hookpod has been multi-faceted and driven largely by commercial reasons such as:

• transparently cheaper financing through the issue of so-called “Blue Bonds”, resulting in a lower interest rate being achieved if certain Environmental criteria are met - best-practice mitigation is one such criteria
• the global seafood market increasingly requiring sustainably caught fish for sale at a premium
• increasing regulation and the requirement to adopt mitigation, along with the roll-out of electronic monitoring (EM) and increasing transparency in fishing operations.

Whilst the training went well, at-sea progress has left some work to be done. After an initial period of two weeks, crews reported perceived lowered catch and increased shark interactions, resulting in the crew removing the Hookpods. Our experience and data in other fisheries have emphatically shown this not to be the case, however at this stage we are unable to verify this as the EM is unavailable until mid-2025. 

Fortunately, the fleet owner. fleet managers and Thai Union are working proactively with us to resolve these issues and achieve a positive outcome. This has resulted in a Phase 2 of this project, commencing shortly in early 2025, when the fleet returns to port.

Hookpods will then be fitted on one vessel only,  which will run all the Hookpods for a trial period.  We are currently working on establishing additional support for crew, onboard or virtually and we are confident that with catches up again across the fleet and assistance in operational use, we can demonstrate the Hookpods effectiveness. 

We will keep you informed as this exciting project develops over the coming months.