By Edward Carver
Fisheries observers hold a job little known by the general public but essential to the health of the oceans: monitoring the work on industrial fishing vessels. The sector has its share of illegal fishing and even other illicit activity, so the job comes with risks. A new documentary shows just how dangerous it is.
Fatal Watch, co-directed by Katie Carpenter and Mark Benjamin, focuses on four unsolved cases in which fisheries observers died or disappeared during the last decade. There have been at least a dozen more worldwide since 2009. The film also casts a critical eye on the industry as a whole, touching on management and transparency issues that the filmmakers see as intertwined with the observer safety problem.
The heroes of Fatal Watch are investigators and campaigners seeking justice for harmed observers and fighting for marine conservation more broadly. Elizabeth Mitchell-Rachin, a board member of the Association for Professional Observers, a nonprofit based in the U.S state of Oregon, is featured as a leading advocate for observer rights. Mitchell-Rachin herself worked as an observer from 1983 until 2008 and knows the dangers firsthand: A captain once threatened to throw her overboard.
Fisheries observers are biological technicians who collect scientific data and report on vessels’ compliance with a range of rules including, for example, those dealing with protected species. They are subject to many of the same dangers and discomforts that fishers face at sea, and then some. As a fisheries observer, “you’re living with the people that you’re reporting on,” Osvaldo Alaniz, a retired special agent with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, says in the film.
At the FBI, Alaniz investigated the case of Keith Davis, an American who disappeared while at sea on a Taiwanese-owned, Panamanian-flagged vessel in 2015. He says in the film that the case was frustrating because the FBI was allowed only a very limited role due to lack of jurisdiction. He says he suspects the disappearance resulted from “foul play,” likely because Davis witnessed illegal fishing or the trafficking of arms or human beings.
“The railing was pretty high all around the ship, so you’re not just going to lean over and fall, you have to forcibly push yourself over — or be pushed over,” Alaniz says.
Before his disappearance, Davis was a passionate conservationist and an advocate for observers and human rights at sea. He was outspoken about crimes he’d witnessed on fishing vessels in the past. Yet he seemed to love some aspects of observer life, despite the dangers. Some of Fatal Watch’s most moving scenes show Davis on deck, presumably recording himself, while singing sea ballads as he plays a ukulele.
The three other cases covered in the film are of those James Numbaru Jr, a Papua New Guinean who went overboard on a Chinese-flagged vessel in 2017; Emmanuel Essien, a Ghanian who disappeared on a Chinese-owned vessel in 2019; and Eritara Aati Kaierua, an I-Kiribati who died on a Taiwanese-flagged vessel in 2020. The film also looks briefly at the case of Samuel Abayateye, another Ghanian who went missing from a South Korean-owned vessel in 2023; a decapitated body that his family believes to be his washed ashore six weeks later. None of the cases have been solved or led to prosecutions.
Co-directors Carpenter and Benjamin approach their work as advocacy journalists. In Fatal Watch, they give relatively little time to voices within the industry or to fisheries management successes. Instead, they mostly tell a story of disastrous mismanagement and give a platform to some of the more outspoken voices in marine science and conservation. These oceans activists — a diverse and passionate cast — give the film a strong moral force. Indeed, they helped shape the narrative, the directors say.
“They deserve a lot of credit, the ocean activists of the world, because they brought us some of the details in these stories that made them just absolutely irresistible to tell,” Carpenter told Mongabay.
Carpenter and Benjamin have worked together for decades, including covering criminality at sea. Their 2016 television series Ocean Warriors was an award-winning eco-thriller documenting the daring efforts of groups like Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to directly confront vessels fishing illegally. That story was also released in 2018 as the feature documentary Chasing the Thunder.
Fatal Watch will premiere in California on 21 March at the Sonoma International Film Festival and play in Washington, D.C., on 24 March at the DC Environmental Film Festival, where Mongabay is a media partner.
Mongabay’s Edward Carver spoke with Carpenter and Benjamin in a video call.
Mongabay: What led you to this story?
Mark Benjamin: We went for the observer story as a window into the bigger picture of overfishing, which is an existential threat to the planet. Obviously, the four murders that we investigated let you into that bigger story. The four investigations are like the Trojan horse of the film. True crime is very accessible to a wide audience. So we made the film about these four murders, but the real soldiers inside the horse are the experts that drop thought bombs on you.
Katie and I have dreamt of this story for a long time, dating back to when I went to the Pacific in 2018. This is a passion-driven project. We thought it had to be made.
Mongabay: What are observers exactly? Are they marine scientists or biologists?
Katie Carpenter: Yeah, mostly they have science degrees, and they join up because they want to work as marine biologists. They’d love a life at sea. Their job is to collect data, for example how many tons of tuna are being caught each day, how long a set is out there, amount of bycatch, and what was done with the bycatch afterwards. Some are even getting data on oil spills and plastics — like anything that happens out there. I mean, some of the observers are very well educated. Some of them are very poor and not that well educated. So it’s a mix.
Mark Benjamin: The pay is good relative to other opportunities in the Pacific.
Mongabay: Who exactly is paying them?
Katie Carpenter: Observation is usually an unfunded mandate by government, with the industry required to cover the cost. In some cases, the money goes through the government, but in most cases, the fishing company pays an agency, and the agency pays the observer.
Mongabay: If the industry is paying you, indirectly, then on some level you go on board as an employee of the company that you’re trying to monitor, no?
Mark Benjamin: Bingo. The industry pays to create a mirage of transparency.
Too much of fisheries management is controlled by the industry. It’s like when we trusted the oil industry to self regulate. They knew about global warming forever. They didn’t tell anybody. Why would the fishing industry tell anybody “We’re going to collapse global fisheries”? They’re not going to tell anybody. Why would they? They’re in business.
Mongabay: Has there been any accountability for observer deaths?
Mark Benjamin: Has there ever been a trial? Has any case of observer death ever gone to trial? The answer is no. That, to me, doesn’t pass the sniff test for justice. We don’t even bring this up in the film. We can’t be sure, but we’ve never heard of a trial, and we’ve been asking the question for six years: “Any trial? Anybody go to trial?” No, no one went to trial.
Mongabay: Did you ever come across observer labour unions, or crew member unions that included observers?
Mark Benjamin: I never heard a word in five years about union organizing.
Mongabay: The film suggests the industry is moving away from human observers and toward electronic monitoring. If that were to happen — as opposed to electronic monitoring supplementing live human observation, which is another possibility — it might solve the human safety issue, but what would it mean for fisheries?
Mark Benjamin: Electronic monitoring is more convenient for the industry. If you want to feign transparency, it’s a lot easier to do with digital information from cameras than observers who you may have to bribe or kill. Throw a sweatshirt over the lens of the camera and do whatever you want, and then take it off when you’re ready.
Mongabay: You draw attention to the Chinese fishing industry in Fatal Watch. Why is that?
Mark Benjamin: We didn’t look for China in this story. It’s just right there. People say, “Oh, why are you dissing China?” We didn’t look to diss anybody. We just were canvassing the story and the subject, and China just pops up everywhere you go: China, China, China. They’re the bad boys out there, and no one debates it. That’s not even debatable. Anyone who’s looked into the story of overfishing recognises that China’s a superpower of overfishing.
Mongabay: Was there any specific evidence that Chinese-flagged vessels are disproportionately dangerous or inhospitable to observers?
Katie Carpenter: We had two cases tied to China among the four we focused on. We can’t give you a percentage, because we don’t know all the cases.
Mongabay: One of those cases was James Numbaru Jr, a man from Papua New Guinea who died on a Chinese-flagged vessel fishing in Nauru waters in 2017. Your film includes footage of his final moments on board, which leaves some ambiguity as to the cause of his going overboard. How did you get that footage?
Mark Benjamin: His father gave it to me but has since died. One of James’ brothers wanted us to travel to the region to meet with the family but then all communication cut off. We don’t know what happened. I don’t want to speculate but we’re assuming intimidation of some sort.
The captain of the vessel that James died on was, at the time of our research, living in a port city in China. We thought Interpol was going to help us reach him, but as things got more difficult in the relationship between the U.S and China, we got boxed out. We were never going to be allowed to come to China to bust this captain..
