We departed Saldanha Bay, South Africa on the morning of 22 September 1987 — the southern spring equinox — aboard a 39-foot Bongers sloop my stepfather Gary had built in our backyard. Obsession. The hull design was Bobby Bongers's, originally drawn in 1969, for the first Cape to Rio race. The four of us aboard were Gary, my mother Ingrid, my sister Sasha, and me. I was fourteen.
We were leaving apartheid-era South Africa. That part of the story has been told elsewhere, and is not what I want to tell here.
What I want to tell is what I saw out on the ocean on this maiden voyage. We had little on board compared with today's cruising yachts. A sextant, a scientific calculator, RDF, paper charts, speed log, depth sounder, magnetic compass and nautical publications. Oh, I nearly forgot, a great sound system. We spent our days doing watches, navigating, fishing, doing some schoolwork, making meals, playing backgammon, watching the ocean around us and at night watching the stars and the moon shine overhead and on the water.
In the South Atlantic, between Southern Africa and the equator, the ocean was alive. I do not mean alive in the sentimental sense. I mean that the ocean was alive with fish, birds, whales and dolphins all around us every day. Most days we saw massive schools of bigeye and yellowfin tuna driving baitfish upward in such density that the water itself appeared to boil. Dolphin pods often working the same schools, sometimes a thousand dolphins visible from one position on deck. Birds — gannets, shearwaters, terns — diving in numbers I cannot now describe without sounding as though I am exaggerating. If we wanted fish for lunch or dinner it was a simple matter of putting a handline out with anything on a hook. A crude lure made from a chip packet — anything that moved would do. Tuna ON! — fresh fish for dinner.
I am not exaggerating. I was fourteen. I had no professional reason to remember it precisely. I remember it precisely because it was the most extraordinary thing I had ever seen, and because nothing that followed in the next thirty-eight years has come close to it.
I have been at sea, professionally, for most of my life since that first ocean passage. Charter captain in the Caribbean from sixteen. Superyacht captain through every major ocean for the three decades since. I have crossed the Atlantic more times than I can count and the South Pacific multiple times. I have lived for years in Vanuatu, cruised the Coral Triangle, Australia, New Zealand, the Coral Sea, Fiji, French Polynesia, the Galápagos, Cocos, and Central America. I have spent enough time on the water to know, in my bones, what a healthy ocean looks like.
What I saw on that maiden voyage from September to December 1987 was not a one-off. I saw schools and bait balls and bird life on that scale again, in different waters, through the late 1980s and into the mid-1990s — across the Atlantic on the passages back and forth from the Caribbean, and later in the Pacific on the ocean voyages that followed. The boiling water, the dolphin pods, the gannets and the terns, the bait balls that stretched to the horizon — they were the ocean to me. That's what I saw. By the mid-1990s I was already starting to notice absences. By the early 2000s the absences were the norm, and the abundance was the exception.
I have watched the ocean life disappear.
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The disappearance has not been sudden. It has been a slow draining — a year-on-year diminishment that, in any single season, is easy to dismiss as bad luck, bad weather, a quiet patch. It is only when you have decades of comparison that the pattern becomes unmistakable. The boiling tuna of 1987 are gone. I have not seen anything like that radius of activity in twenty years. The dolphin pods I once routinely encountered in the eastern Caribbean are smaller now, more skittish, and the encounters are rarer. The frigatebird colonies on remote Pacific atolls — once so thick they darkened the air over a single islet — have thinned to a small fraction of what was there in the 1990s.
This is not a story about climate change, though climate change is part of it. It is a story about extraction. About the systematic removal of biomass from the world's oceans at industrial scale, over the period of one human lifetime, with a deliberate vagueness in the official record about how much has been taken and where.
The numbers, where they exist, are devastating.
Mackerel, tuna, and bonito populations declined by 74 percent globally between 1970 and 2010 — that is the finding of the WWF and Zoological Society of London Living Blue Planet report of 2015, drawing on tens of thousands of population studies. Oceanic shark and ray populations have declined by 71 percent since 1970, while fishing pressure on them has increased eighteen-fold. Three quarters of all oceanic shark and ray species are now threatened with extinction. The biomass of large predatory fish in the North Atlantic is approximately one-tenth of what it was a century ago. Across all vertebrate wildlife, marine and terrestrial combined, populations have declined by roughly 69 percent since 1970 — within my own lifetime.
These are not contested numbers. They come from the international scientific bodies that track this work. They are also not numbers most people have encountered, because the institutional incentive to publicise them is small and the institutional incentive to obscure them is large.
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The obscuring has been structural and longstanding.
For decades, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization — the body officially responsible for global fisheries data — published catch statistics that overstated the health of world fisheries. The figures were assembled from national submissions by member states. Many of those states had political reasons to under-report declines and over-report stable catches. The FAO accepted those submissions and aggregated them. The result, for most of the late twentieth century, was a global picture that suggested fisheries were holding up under pressure.
In the early 2000s a research collaboration based at the University of British Columbia — the Sea Around Us project led by Daniel Pauly — began the difficult work of reconstructing what catches had actually been, drawing on independent records, trade data, port observations, and fisheries research. What they found, when their reconstruction was published, was that global catches had been significantly under-reported for decades, and that the trajectory of marine biomass was far worse than the official data showed. The science was uncomfortable. It was also correct. The FAO has since revised its methodology.
But the larger pattern of obscuring the data has not stopped.
In the Pacific — the ocean I have worked in most — the structural problem is the licensing regime. Pacific island nations, mostly small, mostly resource-poor, mostly dependent on foreign fishing fees for a significant share of national revenue, license their exclusive economic zones to distant-water fishing fleets. Those fleets — operating from countries with far larger economies than the island nations themselves — pay access fees to fish in waters that, on a map, belong to the islanders.
The fee revenue is real. It pays for schools and clinics in places that have few other sources of foreign exchange.
The cost of that revenue is also real, and is paid in the only currency the licensing nations cannot replace: the health of their oceans.
Once a vessel is licensed, what it actually catches — and where, and how much — depends on an observer programme. Observers are supposed to be present on commercial fishing vessels, recording the catch, the bycatch, the locations. In practice the observer programmes across the Pacific have been understaffed, under-resourced, and in too many cases compromised. Observers have been intimidated. In a handful of cases over the past decade, observers have disappeared at sea. The official explanations have been unsatisfactory.
The actual catch volumes are then further obscured by transshipment — the legal but barely-supervised practice of fishing vessels offloading their catch to refrigerated cargo ships in the middle of the ocean rather than returning to port. A transshipped catch can disappear into a supply chain that spans three or four jurisdictions before any of it is counted. By the time the fish reaches a market, its origin is functionally untraceable.
The economic estimates of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in the Pacific run between four and eight billion US dollars per year. The total global estimate is between ten and twenty-three billion. These are the figures cited by the international agencies that track this; they are likely to be conservative. The actual taken biomass, by every credible scientific estimate, exceeds what the licensed catch figures show by a substantial margin.
I am not in a position, from a yacht's bridge, to verify any of those specific numbers. What I can verify is the effect the licensed and unlicensed vessels together have had on the ocean I sail on. The enormous boiling schools of tuna that I saw in the South Atlantic in 1987 — do not exist anywhere in the South Pacific today, in any season, or in any waters I have crossed since my teenage years.
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The change is not subtle. It is not a matter of careful measurement at fine resolution. It is the difference between a sea full of life and a sea that is largely empty. The bird life is gone in many places — gulls, terns, frigatebirds, shearwaters that used to follow the boat for hours have become rare. The flying fish that used to land on deck at night during ocean passages have become unusual. The wake of the boat used to attract feeding fish from below. That no longer happens. Ask any ocean-going commercial fisherman anywhere in the world what they have seen in the past 30 years. They will tell you the same story.
In late May 2026 I jumped off the boat in the Exuma Sound, in the Bahamas — deep water, hundreds of metres beneath me. Mask and fins on, I swam into a school of skipjack to see what was down there. There were maybe a hundred fish in it. Maybe two hundred. Small ones, three kilograms apiece. The Exuma Sound used to teem with life.
The question I cannot stop thinking about is what the next thirty-eight years will look like. The trajectory is not gentle. Fishing pressure has increased eighteen-fold in fifty years. The technology is more efficient every season. The fleets are larger. The enforcement is largely absent. The economic incentives for the operators are enormous. The political incentives for the regulators are mostly in the other direction.
If nothing changes — and this is a curve drawn by the people who have spent their careers measuring this, whose work I trust — the next generation of sailors will be crossing the open ocean in 2064 across days and weeks. Without seeing anything alive at the surface. That is what the trajectory delivers. That is what the data says, if you follow the lines. This is what I am already seeing when I cross the ocean now.
I do not want this to read as despair. I am not in despair. I have seen, in pockets — Cocos Island in Costa Rica, parts of the Galápagos under enforcement, the no-take zones of Raja Ampat where Indonesian rangers have been resourced to do the work of protecting them — what happens when human pressure is removed from a marine ecosystem. The recovery is rapid. The fish return. The sharks return. The whales come back. The ocean wants to be alive. It is held in its current state of decline by specific operations, conducted by specific people, for specific economic reasons, with the protection of specific regulatory and political failures. All of those are addressable.
But they are addressable only if people see what is actually happening. Which is why The Waypoint is going to keep covering this story. Which is why Global Fishing Watch's work matters so much. Which is why I am writing what I have personally witnessed rather than what I have read somewhere.
The work of making the loss legible is the work of every publication, every documentary, every research project, every conservation organisation, and every person at sea who has watched it happen and who is willing to say so.
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I have been at sea for thirty-eight years. My children were born into a world in which the boiling tuna of my fourteenth year had already been gone for two decades. They have not seen what I have seen. The ocean they have known is the diminished one — and they do not know it is diminished, because they have no baseline against which to compare it.
This is the deepest of the structural problems. Each generation accepts the ocean it inherits as the normal one. The frigatebird colonies that have thinned to a fraction are not visible as having been thicker. The pelagic ecosystem that has lost most of its biomass appears, to a young person looking at the surface of the sea for the first time, as the ocean.
The technical name for this is shifting baseline syndrome. It is the slowest of the environmental catastrophes — slow enough that no single generation perceives it, while every generation lives through it.
I have lived through one full generation of it. The ocean I learned to sail on was already a diminished one — I just did not know it then. The ocean my children sail on is a further-diminished one. If we are still extracting marine life at this rate when their children come to the water, the ocean those children inherit will not support what the ocean has supported for the entirety of human civilisation up to now.
Obsession is still sailing. Gary and Ingrid carried her on from the Caribbean through the Americas, across the South Pacific, on to New Zealand and Australia, and finally to Vanuatu, where she remains based today. She has crossed every major ocean. She has carried two generations of our family across nearly four decades of the planet's history. She has been a quiet witness to the same thing I have been a witness to. On a stop at Cocos Island in 1991, Gary carved Obsession '91 into the volcanic basalt above the high-water mark. Thirty-four years later I returned to that same rock with my eldest son Thomas. The carving was still there. The hammerhead schools and the manta rays were still there too, because the Costa Rican government has done the work of protecting them. The ocean Obsession sails in is not the ocean she sailed in 1987 — but in the places where it has been allowed to recover, it has.
I am one observer. I remember what I have seen.
— Justin