The cold weather is settling in these days, and no matter how long or hot the summer was, it looks like we will still get a real winter as its counterbalance.
The lush leaves of summer are falling on empty fields and it’s that season of bleak acceptance that it will be a while before it gets truly warm again.
It’ll get darker before it gets lighter again.
There was the news this week that follows on something I’ve written about before, the epic sea chase of one of the sea’s most notorious illegal fishing boats, the Nigerian-registered Thunder, by the environmental activist vessel, the Sea Shepherd.
Fallen leaves on bare furrows.
All photos: PKR
The world’s longest recorded pursuit on the high seas ended in July, after 110 days and 10,000 nautical miles, with the captain of the Thunder deliberately sinking his own ship and the entire cargo to prevent any evidence that could incriminate them.
Who rescued the crew? Why, the Sea Shepherd, of course – but not before boarding the sinking ship and retrieving some of the frozen, and pirated, Patagonian toothfish (aka Chilean sea bass) at the heart of the whole chase.
The story of the Thunder makes for grim reading – besides the industrial-scale poaching, the flouting of international laws and including a side story of alleged human trafficking victims that made up the Indonesian deck crew – there is a silver lining.
Because this week, a court in São Tomé and Príncipe, the island nation off the west coast of Africa where the Thunder crew was taken after rescue, convicted the captain and two senior crew of multiple charges linked to illegal fishing, including forgery, pollution, and damage to the environment. 
Lacking jurisdiction to prosecute illegal fishing in the Antarctic, the courts nonetheless found charges they could make stick – the Nigerian flag under which the Thunder had been operating had been rescinded by the Nigerian government because the company that allegedly owned the Thunder didn’t exist; the Chilean government had stripped the Chilean-born captain, Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo, of his fishing license in 2014.
The three convicted Thunder crew have each been sentenced to almost three years in prison and collectively fined $17 million – which I’m assuming their yet-to-be identified employers (some Spanish fishing companies are under investigation) won’t pay, so unless these guys actually kept bank accounts somewhere for all those fishing profits, it’s a symbolic fine to indicate the magnitude of the crime.
Pulling back to focus on the larger picture, this latest and very rare conviction is a step forward, perhaps one that provides more of a template than more direct approach of Palau to fighting illegal fishing – the Pacific island nation has started seizing boats suspected of illegal fishing and burning them to the water line.
Here in France, there’s seed out in the garden birdfeeders for migrating birds on their way south, and for the hardy little souls that remain here over the winter, so that they can find spring again and reproduce.
The bulbs are going into the chilling earth to get the shiver they require to germinate next year. The winter wheat is being seeded out under circles of falling hedgerow leaves.
In seasons and in the fight against illegal fishing, some endings beget other beginnings, even if we can’t quite see them yet.