Ghost gear recovery
Lost nets keep fishing for decades with nobody at the helm. Our dive teams and paid local crews locate, cut, and recycle them — 412 tonnes landed so far, every kilogram weighed at the dock.
Flagship program Back the current haulField Note 47 · Northern reef district · Last spring tide
The net that fished for eleven years
We found it the way we find most of them — a fisherman's tip and a sonar shadow where the seabed should have been clean. Four hundred meters of trawl net, lost in a storm more than a decade ago, still catching. Still killing. Crab pots fouled inside it like knots in wet rope.
It took two boats, six divers, and the better part of three tides to bring it up. The winch stalled twice. A crowd gathered on the pier by the time the last section broke the surface, streaming mud and old floats, and somebody's grandfather recognized the mesh gauge from a fleet that stopped sailing years ago.
“Everyone on that pier had lost gear to that ground. Nobody knew it was all still down there, fishing without us.”
— Skipper, recovery vessel Peregrine
The net weighed out at 2.8 tonnes. The nylon is already on its way to a recycler that turns it into skateboard decks and sunglass frames. The ground it smothered is on next season's nursery list. That is the whole model, in one haul: find it, lift it, give the sea its ground back, and write down exactly what it cost.