Original subtitles

- My name is Matt Blomberg,

I'm a investigative journalist in Cambodia.

Four years ago, I was a sports reporter in Australia.

That was my goal in life,

and then I came here on a holiday.

I didn't want to go home,

so I applied for a job at The Cambodia Daily.

There's not much professional sport here, so

I got sucked into the world of

corruption and investigation and scandal.

There's a lot of different people

using a lot of different methods to try and confront

injustices all over the world.

For me, the most effective way is with a pen and a camera.

From Phnom Penh I was following the story about illegal fishing

and starting to get little bits of stories

about the lawlessness at sea.

And then one day

I heard that a Cambodian man was killed

in a clash of Vietnamese fishermen.

To where?

Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah for sure.

So I went down and visited the village,

met the widow,

Then started, you know,

poking around the villages and asking questions.

- Was there any justice for the death of Auok?

- The governors think they are wrong.

- At this point, I hadn't seen anything myself.

So I went and asked the captain to take me out.

It's a really volatile situation

because there's so many fishing villages

who are all living off the same patch of ocean.

There's hundreds of boats that go out every night.

There's these fishing communities all along the coast.

The scale is massive.

He says that all these

boats with their lights off are Vietnamese and that,

this is Cambodian water for a little bit more.

So that's everything off the sea floor.

Everything.

I watched them drag hundreds of kilos worth of sea life

onto the boat.

20% of it is put into buckets

that are going to be sold at market later

and then the rest of it,

the stuff that wasn't worth any money, just died.

Their yields are down exponentially every year.

The yields are dropping and dropping and dropping.

It's a race to the bottom.

The more villages I went to,

I just kept hearing the same story.

There's no fish left,

that the Vietnamese had taken all the fish

and that the local fishermen are powerless to stop them.

If you have a look at the maps, you can see that

Thailand in the west and Vietnam in the east,

their waters have been fished out.

The Vietnamese have pillaged their own oceans and

the fishing fleets from there are moving into Cambodia.

There's billions of dollars worth of seafood

exported from Southeast Asia every year.

And so, a lot of people around the world

are affected by the things that happen here.

In Cambodia, things are pretty desperate.

It became apparent very quickly how serious this issue is.

If this problem is not addressed, it's only a matter

of time before there's no fisheries in Cambodia at all.

Hundreds of thousands of people's

livelihoods are on the line.

Through talking to the fishermen down there,

I found out about

this vigilante British guy who was living on an island

off the coast and

doing his best to try and keep the illegal fishers at bay.

So, I'm thinking to myself,

"Who is this guy Paul?"

- At least one set of Vietnamese pair trawlers,

First one,

somewhere between 500 meters and 1 kilometre

north of Koh Seh. Now we...

- Paul's strategy is to flood Facebook with

live streams when he's out on patrol.

- Oh there he is, throwing stuff!

Live on Facebook! Here we go, chasing the boat.

- 90% of Cambodians

see Facebook as their lead source of information.

And he knows that pretty high ranking people are watching,

- Okay here we are, continuous offenders.

- And that if he keeps slapping them in the face

someone will react eventually.

- Guy's waving an axe at us.

- The illegal fishermen are notoriously violent.

They go to work armed with machetes and slingshots

and homemade guns and anyone who gets in their way,

they're willing to use those weapons.

They've rammed boats, they've sunk boats,

they've launched coordinated attacks even.

- 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 electric trawlers

trying to ram our boat right now.

- Obviously I was quite interested in it,

so I went down there looking for him.

I also heard that Paul

wasn't very keen on talking to the media.

His staff told me, you know, he doesn't like journalists.

The small one has all the cameras and some stuff in it.

How're you doing, Paul?

My first impression was that

getting along with Paul will be difficult.

What I wanted to do

was to get into a position where we can share information.

- Nothing else to do.

- But it took me a little while

to even gain his attention.

- I approached him and sat down and

slowly started chatting to him.

No, it's okay. We've done all the

research we've been doing it first...

And I guess I won his trust in the end.

At the end, at the end.

Yeah, yeah. It was like, that was exactly...

- At the very beginning when these little seahorse trawlers

came over from Vietnam,

this was what the bycatch looked like.

So it was a really, really sensitive habitats

that hadn't been disturbed.

So you've got, that's a, say a 30 minute trawl,

and they have that much life in it.

This is exact, almost the same trawler

and that's what they catch now.

So the first one was, I think 2008,

so they get, and that will be maybe a two hour trawl.

It's pretty crazy how little there is now left.

But I've got to say,

the Vietnamese ones must be working hard..

Matt contacted me

and I gave him a bit of information about things

and we talked and it sort of progressed from there.

The other and he's like,

"If I had this and if I had this..."

Twelve years ago, I was a diver,

I loved the ocean and I came to Cambodia

to work as a dive instructor.

It was a very small island.

Just off the coast of Sihanoukville, called Koh Koun.

When the ocean started being destroyed,

no one else was there to stop it

and I was there.

There wasn't really a choice, it had to be done.

So, that was when I started Marine Conservation Cambodia.

- We started out to protect the seahorses here

and the more we started to work with the community,

the more we understood how little fish were left

and it became much more about

protecting the community and the whole marine environment.

We worked on getting the illegal sand dredging banned.

We ran a clinic.

We ran a small English school, for the local kids.

It was very successful.

And the deputy governor

basically asked if we were interested in doing,

in the ocean here in Kep,

exactly what we'd done there.

And so, we set up MCC here in Kep,

and then we began work.

- MCC has a very small area in front of Koh Seh,

the island that they populate.

- We have the conservation area

that we've officially been granted

by the provincial government.

- And it's surrounded on three sides by Vietnam.

- Essentially we really are

smack bang on the front line.

- This is the border, right here,

between Cambodia and Vietnam.

This is our medium boat.

This is the boat that we go patrolling on.

Phon is the captain on the boat.

- We run the patrols

to stop the trawling boats

from going into the marine conservation areas.

Three electric boats,

Clearly know they're in the wrong.

They're running from our boat right now.

- They also have an extensive research program

that follows the seahorse populations in the area.

MCC is a really grassroots operation.

Y'know they're all living on a thread out there.

For Paul, every time he wakes up in the morning,

he's risking everything.

'Cause he's got his family, he's got five kids and a wife

living on that small island with him.

- Hello everybody. - Hello everybody.

- So can you give us hundreds of money, all your moneys.

- You guys love being live, don't you?

- Papa I want to say something too.

- What do you want to say? What'd you want to say?

- Whoever is watching me right now,

please help me to save this island and this ocean.

- That was so sweet.

If we can protect this area,

this tiny little oasis of recovery,

then we can expand everything,

encompassing a much larger conservation area

called an MFMA,

which is a Marine Fisheries Management Area.

And essentially within that you then have zones that allow

a breeding season to happen without the interference,

conservation zones, which are entirely no take.

If you've got the conservation zones

and they're fully protected,

you have areas for the fish to move out.

First year you have no fish,

then you have a few fish,

because you have a few,

you have a few more the next year.

Once it gets to a certain point,

there's so much life there that breeds and produces

new offspring that it explodes

and spawns other areas of recovery.

And research has to be done

to back up everything that we're doing.

- So basically,

after having seeing lots of different individuals

but without being able to identify them,

it's very hard to differentiate different seahorses.

So if you want to be able to track

the evolution of a single individual inside the coral reef

then we need some kind of way to identify it.

Today we have the pink and the green,

which hopefully will have a good mark under water.

Alright, let's go.

- Amick leads the research and

the scientific side of operations.

He is bringing in volunteers and divers

and scientists to help do the monitoring of the water.

- If we do the research to prove

to the provincial government

that the work that we're doing is working,

then we can take this to the entire archipelago

to protect all of the essential habitats that need to be

under the umbrella of this MFMA.

Around 2008,

Cambodia's diving equaled what people now think of as

the best diving sites in the world.

Where divers from all over the world go to do photography

to find the craziest critters that no one else sees.

The seahorse was the thing that I enjoyed spending

most of my time in the water with.

They're incredibly beautiful to watch.

Because of Cambodia's recent history, the genocide,

they'd been untouched by industrial fishing.

Seahorses were pretty much everywhere.

And then a few years later

we had this huge influx of Vietnamese boats

targeting the seahorses in the inshore areas.

The trawling boats were increasing

and you'd go to a dive site

and you'd been diving there for six months, seven months,

and you knew the area, it was beautiful,

and all of a sudden you go down

just looks like someone had just taken a bulldozer to it.

There's absolutely nothing left whatsoever.

You've got bare sand, crushed shells,

half dead things everywhere

it was just... it was horrific.

They've got their nets laid out

because they're all the same flags.

We started out

and the illegal fishing was worse than in Sihanoukville.

Sihanoukville was bad,

but here was pretty much like the Wild West.

They're actually illegal.

All the boats work with complete impunity.

Yeah, so if you look at the mesh size of this net,

this net's actually illegal.

You can get a look at the size of the fish in this net,

it's like a mosquito net.

All tiny juvenile fish.

One illegal boat pulling everything up.

Nothing escapes those nets.

- MCC has managed

to gain some kind of trust with the government

to be allowed to go in and

tackle the illegal fishing that goes on there,

but they're walking a very fine line between

doing what is right and

pleasing the people who hold the key to their existence.

- Anyone got a camera that's got a good zoom on it?

It looks like a 18 to 20 person Vietnamese IUU boat.

We've got to turn around now.

Basically the police have stopped us

from coming into this area

and all these Vietnamese boats know that

and that's where they run to.

- MCC is essentially doing what the police

and the fisheries are supposed to be doing.

The trawlers have operated with impunity for at least 10 years.

Bottom trawling is where

they drop a net off the back of the boat

and inside the front of the net are these timber sleds

that drive the net down into the ocean floor.

And then the net is dragged along the ocean floor

for kilometres.

And scoops and smashes

everything that it passes over.

- Oh, look at all that sea grass.

All the seagrass on that boat.

That whole pile is seagrass.

- When there's nothing left on the bottom to catch.

Then there's the electric version of those.

- Electric trawling is just your average standard trawler,

but they connect an electric cable to the net

that goes through a copper wire

and then they send a thousand volt pulse

down into the water and

electrocute everything as they go.

Anything that's been electrocuted

by one of those nets

dies within 48 hours.

And so, as they go along taking all of the fish

they're also taking with it all of the habitat.

So there can't be any regeneration.

Yeah.

Here he is with all the sea grass in the net,

yeah, same guy, he just doesn't care.

- And then there's the pair trawler,

it can be nets hundreds of meters long

slung between two massive boats

and then dragged through swathes of ocean kilometres,

it can wipe out acres of underwater habitat in one night.

The pair trawlers in Cambodia come from Vietnam.

This we know, there's no Cambodian pair trawlers.

- Vietnam pair trawler.

That's Koh Puh there, Koh Mak Prang.

There's the two pair trawler.

- It's the most destructive thing

that I've come across within the ocean so far,

so that's why it's really essential that we

stop the trawling bags from going in to the protected area.

- Are you going to...

- You just wait, wait here.

This is the idea of the blocks.

We deploy them under water.

The idea is to come up to about seven blocks high.

If it's seven blocks high

it will weigh just over three tons.

The blocks have two main purposes, which is

to create artificial habitat

and also to function as an anti trawling device

to stop the illegal trawlers.

And we're mixing them all by hand so,

we've made about 200 so far.

This is our mixing and making station.

We can do everything by hand.

We don't have to worry about heavy machinery,

high labor costs.

We build with very basic materials.

Essentially it's a very adaptable system.

- I just see all the possibilities of this place

and it's just waiting to bloom

and develop into something incredible.

It has to be all good.

Maybe, one of or two of you could bring a bench

and you can just sit in a circle.

Just a practice, we do that for fun.

We're going to discuss why we think which fish is who,

the shape of the fish, his color,

his behaviors help us decipher what fish it is.

- Conservation is far from

anywhere near the top of the agenda for most Cambodians,

but we met a couple of

Cambodian students over there doing research.

- All right. What is it?

- Yes. Very good.

Gold fish.

- They're here to do their thesis.

And they are beginning an early testing and monitoring program

for the block systems that we'd like to implement

for the MFMA on a much larger scale.

I've always thought this isn't,

this isn't a job for foreigners,

it's going to be Cambodian people

that make the changes here.

They can do this so much more efficiently than we can.

- Vida and Rachana are swimming against the tide.

They will tell you that their parents

didn't want them to get involved in this stuff.

And they'll also tell you that the university professors

advised them against it because

it's just not seen as a stable career here.

- This is a good example,

this story is a absolutely flagrant abuse

of the fisheries law.

Hundreds of Vietnamese fishermen

floating around in these little cane baskets,

taking hundreds of kilos of squid out of the Cambodian water

every single day

and paying those who are supposed to be stopping them

for the privilege.

It took us a few days to find them

because they're way out in the open ocean.

But when we did, they told us everything.

They told us who they pay, how much they pay,

and it all checked out.

I haven't been back looking for the Vietnamese guys,

but I would bet that they're still there.

I also would bet that

this story caused some problems for some people,

because all these guys are named.

As a Western journalist, you have to be very cautious

with the way that you approach stories because

you have a completely different angle on everything.

You get people saying, you know,

"What are you doing interfering, it's not your business?"

And, you know, there's some elements of that argument

that I can agree with.

But at the same time,

a great part of the reason why I do this work is because

I've become so attached to the country.

It has become my home.

Thank you.

I have a much stronger connection to this place

and these people than I do to even Australia.

And what happens here does actually affect me.

I know that I'm privileged and lucky

to be able to do what I do.

And I feel like I have a duty to use my skills

as best as I can to try to improve the situation.

- How are you? - Good.

- And it's a wonderful opportunity

to have Matt here again from The Cambodia Daily.

- I moved out to Cambodia from Australia in 2012.

One of the things that I saw was the unsustainable depletion

of the natural resources of Cambodia.

There's great resources here

in the forest and in the ocean particularly,

and they're all being exploited improperly.

Who here wants to be a journalist?

It's gotten worse since last year.

- It's gotten worse.

- Yeah.

- Why doesn't anyone want to be a journalist?

- Because here for, I think, for Cambodians, like,

we see investigative journalism

as sort of, pretty life threatening.

Like, it bars people from it.

- This is like the class for journalism in Cambodia right?

If you're not here, you're not. - Right.

- Yeah.

It's kind of not, not that easy for Cambodians

to stand up and say,

"That's wrong" and "that's wrong"

when it is.

If you do this job

and it doesn't look like many of you want to do it,

but it's a really rewarding kind of job.

It's exciting.

Organizations put together lists

of countries that are most dangerous to be journalists in.

And Cambodia recently was named the most dangerous place

to be an environmental journalist.

Over the years we've seen a number

of environmental activists and political commentators

murdered, some in cold blood in broad daylight.

- One of Asia's leading environmental activists

was gunned down in Cambodia.

- The local reporters are much more at risk

than we foreigners are.

Deleting a foreigner isn't going to be swept under the carpet

like deleting a local activist can be.

So in some senses, I guess I often feel like

I have a responsibility to the local reporters.

If something goes wrong,

I can pack my bag and go,

but the local reporters, they can't.

- Oh, here we go.

Morning.

- Hot, sweaty.

Chasing illegal boats this morning on the way back,

nearly didn't make it on time.

- Yeah. that's been my main work.

I have the guys that all focus on the research, but

I tend to spend most of my time with, on the

sort of, legal fishing and the IUU.

- It's better but it's harder.

I've been on this personally for around eight years

and I was financing it from businesses that I had

and we can see the finish line,

we've just got to this point where

basically I've run out of money.

I mean, I've sold my land, I've sold my house,

I've sold everything.

And I'm now at a point where we,

we basically struggling just to buy the food every day.

So we applied to the conservation fund of Canada

for an emergency grant

so that we could basically continue the patrols,

which was $3000 a month

to cover fuel and the patrol team

and then an extra thousand for

like, maintenance and stuff like that.

- Yeah.

Oof.

- I found out that one Cambodian fishing village

on the coast has gone particularly militant.

Prek Tanin, or "Shock Village" as it's known locally,

is just a few K's from MCC's Island.

And I'd heard that

they've electrified all their nets.

See this blue electric,

this blue wire down here,

that's electric.

This chain runs around the mouth of the net

and then this electric current is hooked onto the chain.

They'll tell us that

that electric wire is for their lights and stuff but

right here we can see that

it's hooked up to the mouth of the trawling net.

They know that we're here

collecting information so that's...

we collected the right information that means.

Getting kicked out is always a good sign, right?

- Oh wait, you're together.

- Don't show it.

Don't show yet.

- Aren't you playing Braiden?

Okay, let's do it.

Start the engine.

Just be careful.

There's something a little bit strange about them.

They have their light on and they're signaling to us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right here!

Okay, let's bring it in!

This way! This way! This way!

Here! Here! Here!

- Ah man!

That kills my heart man!

- Bring him out! Bring him out! Bring him out!

- He's dead already!

- He's not breathe-

Oh yes! He breathes! He breathes!

- Get it in the ocean!

- You got to go, you got to go in there.

- Come on. - Come on

- You've got to breathe, man.

- Come on, you need to breathe!

- Hey, hey.

- Bok. Bok. Bok. Bok. Bok.

Bok!

Come back here. We take the net, you quiet.

Small scale! Dude!

Small scale! Bok!

Alright. Take all those needle fish off this boat.

Come sit down

- Was it a good catch tonight?

Just take time.

I'm sorry I can't make it any faster.

I'd like to make it faster, but I can't. You know?

Maybe he wants to give his phone number or

take the phone number from one of you yeah,

so when he hear the pair trawler or the Vietnamese boats come in,

he can call to us we can inform or help him.

I think is good.

- Damn. - Yeah we raised those fish.

- Yeah we did.

- Small scale fishermen have been here since

the area was repopulated after the fall of the Khmer Rouge.

A large portion of Cambodians still live in severe poverty.

The fishermen who are scrapping for their survival every day

are left to kind of fight amongst themselves,

which is so sad.

- Small scale fishermen use methods that

aren't that destructive and are sustainable.

But then you have the illegal fishermen from Vietnam

and the electric boats come into Cambodia

and take as many fish

as a small fishermen would take in months.

So the Cambodian fishermen upgrade

to using electric trawlers, just to keep up.

- I was having a discussion with an illegal fishermen one time

and I was sat on the boat in all my righteousness of,

"Your children aren't going to have any fish."

This guy turned around to me and went,

"Well, if I don't catch the fish today,

I won't have any children."

I can't answer that.

If you don't feed the kids, kids die.

He's not thinking about tomorrow or the next day,

or what these kids will have in the future.

So, it changed me and it changed my mentality.

I absolutely adore my kids.

I'm the luckiest man on the planet

to have such wonderful kids.

But, bringing up kids in the world that we live in

is hard. So hard.

Our societies are built on so many of the wrong criteria.

This all washed in today.

- But I hope that

growing up the way they have,

they will all be advocates and ambassadors of nature.

- Tiny little fish baby. Wow.

- They're interested in nature.

They're interesting in how nature works.

They ask all the right questions.

- Sometimes the kids ask me questions that

properly make me cry

because I don't have an answer for them.

- But I hope that they will realize that

our natural world is more important than anything

because without it, what do we have?

My kids make me feel like I have to continue

Like, I have to be an example to them.

- Happy New Year!

- We want to conserve the environment

and at the same time we want to bring some culture,

Cambodian culture, into the conservation.

- Guys go! 1, 2, 3!

- I want to see it recover.

I want to see happy long-tail fishermen fishing legally,

catching great big crabs.

I want to see the little communities

becoming communities again

where they don't have to move away to get jobs

where they can just go into the ocean.

I want to go diving and see the stuff that should be there.

I want to see blue water every day

cause it's not foul and disgusting

from being dragged up with the trawlers.

It could be beautiful.

It was beautiful once.

- We've got 25 minutes.

For years I'd heard that

the Vietnamese pair trawlers fishing in Cambodia

come from the island of Phu Quoc,

which on a map appears to be in Cambodian water

but is in fact Vietnamese.

So, I wanted to see what was actually happening there.

And there's a lot of strange underwater creatures

for sale there that you can pick out of a tank and then eat.

What's that guy?

Shark, yeah?

Kinda looks like a reef shark.

Come have a look at the colors on these Stingrays.

- You want to take a picture?

- Eco tours, hey? - Yeah.

- So can you do a tour into the ocean or not?

- Nah.

- Why?

- Overfishing? Really?

You know about the fishermen going into Cambodia?

- Wow.

- Yeah we just get in the evening.

- From the boat? - Yes...

- Okay. and they go to the, across the river here?

- Yes from the ocean.

- I want to see the boat.

When the boat comes back to the village.

What would be a good time to go?

- Morning.

- Morning?

Oh, they come back in the morning.

- They come back in the morning after they catch the fish.

- Okay, good luck man.

I'll see you.

Thank you.

These things are slowly dying.

Pregnant seahorse.

Big fella too.

I found a fishing village

that is said to be the hub for the giant pair trawlers.

Oh yeah, there it is.

- One boat fishes, one brings ice.

One fishes and one brings ice.

Those guys on the second boat over: "No photos, no photos."

How are you man?

You can see the size of the nets.

Hundreds and hundreds of meters worth of nets.

One of these boats can come into Cambodia

and take as many fish as a small trawler would take in months.

It's industrial fishing on a large scale.

Cambodians and Vietnamese,

they're not competing on a level playing field.

These commercial scale trawlers are

undoubtedly coming across the border

and harvesting millions of dollars worth of Cambodian fish

that subsistence fishermen in Cambodia need just to get by.

Which is why the trawlers of Prek Tanin in Cambodia

have wired their nets with electric

because there's simply nothing left for them to catch.

We're managing to prove that the blocks are working.

The next step is for the MFMA to be agreed upon

by all of the different stakeholders,

the local fishing communities, fishers,

various different levels of government,

which then allows us to continue to do work on the plan.

- But now I'm working for Paul

on communication with the communities

and the fishermen about the MFMA and it's really good.

- More than this? - Yeah, more than this,

Yeah.

Do you know who's making them now?

Are they buying them from Vietnam or

other people in Cambodia are you making them?

- Vietnam - Vietnam sir.

- Do you ever,

the fishermen that you arrest

do they ever get angry?

The head of the Kampot fisheries, Sorin,

he's one of these new breed

of officials who have come into government

looking to concentrate on issues

that just haven't been a focus for the government

in years past.

- The fisheries are almost fatally hamstrung

by a lack of resources,

which kind of leaves a gap for people like Paul.

- So, this was our original request,

so it was four different zones,

which equaled out to 5 kilometers

away from the islands.

We've got this conservation area agreed

but we making it square so it makes it slightly bigger.

- Yeah.

- The Koh Pu and Mak Prang one we cut down,

which covers the seagrass and Mak Prang,

We're talking about 70 square kilometers

- Okay. - Together.

- And you get four islands in... - We get four islands in yeah.

Four islands with Koh Seh and Mak Prang.

- Things can move really, really slowly in Cambodian bureaucracy.

- Oh yeah. Cool.

So that's the idea.

It will still has to go through the consultations

so it will change slightly but...

so yeah, got to get it done now.

- We were able to publish a number of stories about

conservation and destruction of the ocean

which is something that hadn't been written about a lot.

- My work and Paul's work I guess kind of work together.

Paul does something and then I write a story about it

and then we publish it and then more people know about it.

And their story is slowly starting to get out there.

I suppose it was seahorses

that started everything.

I spent a long time with them.

They sort of get to know you,

you can spend a long time photographing and videoing them.

I developed a sort of relationship...

- Mmh

It was really, really hard to choose,

like between something that was chunky, heavy, and solid

or something that was like light and fast.

Its looking very, very nice.

It's beautiful isn't it?

- So you can just drive it straight

into some of these trawlers.

- But they've done a beautiful job.

They got a little bit on the front.

The International Conservation Fund of Canada

managed to supply funds to buy a speed boat.

Who knows about this?

- Up until a couple of days ago, absolutely no one.

Now, Sorin and all his team know,

they've seen all the pictures.

Pardon?

This one?

Yeah, yeah, they're going to change that.

- Hey, Sorin.

- Tie that boat, bring it back.

Heading straight in towards us, now he's see our boat coming

he's turned around he's try to run back to Vietnam.

Good job, dad!

- You want to go on?

- Yeah!

- Okay.

- I'm going first!

I don't know,

I think it was out...

The success that we're seeing is quite amazing.

These boats that have been able to come in here

for many, many years and do whatever they like,

and now there's a defense

and this means that the pressure for illegal fishers is huge.

Okay, Paul, it's recording.

Recently, we've seen that the illegal fishers themselves

are exceedingly violent.

The success that we've had is resulting

for sure in a backlash.

They really need to get rid of us

because what we're doing is successful.

Okay, there's about seven or eight boats from Prek Tanin,

chasing us here.

You see them all. You hear the noises this is all

the boats chasing behind, throwing rocks.

- Hold on!

We're just 2 boats up against fucking 10.

They're fucking everywhere.

We're being attacked.

I've always thought that when things are wrong

and nobody does anything about them,

they just continue to be wrong.

You have to stand up at that point and say,

"Right, no, I'm not taking this."

Alright.

What I'm gonna do now is I'm at the pier

and I'm going to go and drive across

to show just how easy it is to find

where the electric trawlers are.

And the fact that they've come into our area now

three nights running almost all night.

Plus we've got dead dolphins again.

I'm going to show you how easy it is to find them.

So right now I'm going to turn the camera around.

You don't have to be awake all night chasing boats,

spending lots of fuel and time.

What we can do, or what anybody can do,

is just wait for them where they are.

Yeah? - Yeah.

- Four years and they still operate.

They get caught,

the gear gets taken off,

somehow a lot of that gear actually gets returned to them

and that thing really, really frustrates me.

I do not understand how they can be caught,

the gear is confiscated,

and then the same boats are out with the same gear.

We've even marked some of that gear

and then found that same gear back on those boats.

Oh I see them.

- Yeah. - Pretty close.

- Can we see all those boats? - Yeah. Yeah.

- So we're just going to go past,

so it's been around five minutes

and already we're at the place where they could be inspected,

they could be inspected every single day.

None of these folks have registered.

They're here everyday and night.

- Everyday and night.

The problem is

the block system is going to take a few months to get in

and these guys are now going full on full out

because they know it's going to happen.

We need some help.

We need assistance to stop these boats

whilst we're installing the blocks

before there's nothing left to protect.

The status quo on the coast has existed for a long time.

A boat there.

And Paul is seen as a troublemaker, the foreigner

who's come in and rocked the boat

and so there's people who want him shut down.

- Okay, okay bye.

We've been stopped from going out on patrol.

The local government is trying to avoid international incidents

that cause a problem between Cambodia

and its neighboring countries.

But I think it's being used as an excuse to stop us going out

or have us closed down.

Yeah.

- Sad.

- Yeah.

It's sad.

It's all good.

Come on, Rachana.

Hey, do not break.

- No matter what he's done for the ocean,

they still think that he's a foreigner

and that's really sad.

Like you cannot just say you're the white person,

you don't love my ocean more than I do,

you don't love my country more than I do,

which is completely wrong.

- The frustration and hurt and

how it makes you feel inside is intense.

Watching something you love die

and using every single power that you have

to stop yourself doing the one thing that's right,

which is to go out and stop.

If MCC was removed from Koh Seh,

the fishermen would be lining up to get in there.

Everything that they've worked for,

would be gone in a matter of days.

- Sometimes I think like, are you stupid?

Like are you fucking stupid?

Why do you carry on?

Why are we doing this?

Is your family not more important to you than the ocean?

But last night was bad, there's two big pairs.

I mean like big,

you could see the silhouette bigger than our big boat,

just came straight through here.

That's the thing that I'm trying to get them to understand

at the moment is that, like,

the blocks are the only way to do it.

Even if you've run the patrols,

and even if you catch them an hour into what they're doing,

they've done that damage.

You've got to prevent the damage that they're doing,

it's not just about catching them,

it's about stopping them in the first place.

- It's very clear that

the government has to be convinced

that this is the right thing to do.

This is a story that I wrote for Mongabay.

The most recent story that I've published.

The story itself is about Paul's MFMA

and it's kind of looking forward to,

what could happen if they get this plan underway.

It's Paul and Sar Sorin.

With a bunch of, electric gear

that they've confiscated off boats.

Here's a nice image of a trawler

that I got off the coast of Kampot.

Journalists can make things change.

If we're not exposing some of these things then,

the governments have no reason to do anything about them.

Here we have a trawler illegally fishing right outside our area

within our 300 meters.

You need to sink about five or six of these boats,

put them around, and we got beautiful artificial reef.

We have a second boat in the background there.

We're just waiting on police officers to come

and assist us because we've been told we're not allowed to go

and tackle these big old boats on our own.

There you go.

Feeling fucking frustrated.

Two sets of pair trawlers already doing damage and

absolutely no action.

So here we are again on another night.

Sometimes I really wonder,

like, what is going through their heads.

There's been many times it's been rocky,

but we wouldn't still be here

if the government of Cambodia didn't support what we do.

I don't see an end to it unless they stopped me doing it.

One pair, two pair, one missing.

I want to know where this one's gone.

That's the one I'm looking for.

Can you see it?

You can't see that?

Yeah, he's passing it.

You see over there, Puppet?

- Oh okay let's go.

- Take us towards them.

Is there any way we can get some support from Neak?

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we should be careful.

He's dropped his net.

He's cut his net.

His net is in the water.

That big motherfucker is running.

Hey move, move, move, move.

Move, now.

- You got one of them there Paul.

- Yeah, yeah I see him.

Hey, Virak, now we've got two.

We're 300 meters from Koh Seh.

One has dropped his net and he's running

and there's one other boat with him.

And he's signaling for his friends.

He's calling his friends, he's signaling to the other boats.

Let's go after the other one.

Carney,

give me the baseball bat just in case.

See the electric cable?

Phon, put me into the front.

Okay?

- Ooh.

You guys, man.

- That is a squid.

Yeah.

You know like the big squid that you see on the market?

That's a baby one.

So he's never going to get to be a big squid.

A whole load of them, tiny little babies.

Never going to get any bigger.

I've had enough of these dudes, man.

He's been told that many times

he's still got electric, they still don't stop.

Phon, do the same, yeah? Tow him.

Even I feel sorry for these guys right now.

But at the same time you've got these legal fishermen out there

and the legal fishermen have nothing

and they're losing their livelihoods to these guys.

- We caught them on time and they pulled the neck and said

they go out but they obviously...

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

MCC's been on the front lines of this battle for years now,

largely on their own.

But, finally the government is starting to realize

that they're doing this for the right reason

and that it's the right thing to do.

- This is the same way they did for Kampot in 2008, I think.

- He posted 1 out of 10 drop the drop.

- Yeah.

If we can make, like document,

like a request,

then I can show for the donor for the money.

Now we have full backing and permission

from high ranking people within the government of Cambodia

to go out and stop boats again.

- At the moment we have marine police, provincial police,

fisheries.

They've come down to take these people to the court.

To have the Marine police and the provincial police here means

that they're really, really starting to take it seriously.

I'm impressed. I'll be honest, I'm seriously impressed.

- Yeah. - Okay.

- It is a big step because when you arrest someone,

it begins a process that's supposed to be followed.

Right? And we've seen in the past that

they don't follow the process, but, every time you see

the fisheries guys doing their job,

it's a great sign for things to come.

Okay.

The whole MCC project

was built from scratch by Paul and his people

with their bare hands and with very little money.

The problem of overfishing in Cambodia is so complex

and involves so many moving parts that

if it can be solved here,

it can probably be solved anywhere around the world.

Just on the small scale that we've been doing,

we have a proof that the ocean can recover.

The MFMA is enough to give you hope.

It will be a signal to the illegal fishers,

the government is serious about changing things.

- Okay, everybody here this morning,

I'd like to introduce you to, Angie San

is the excellency director general of

Fisheries Administration.

Director Angel San's come today to

officially drop the first demarcation blocks

so that we can begin to protect the area with

anti-trawling devices that create fish homes.

- The idea is each block is around 150

and then we have a big metal pole

block to join them together.

- Right.

- So this is the actual fish aggregation device.

So it's attracting the fish into it.

So the moment we put these to the test,

within one to two days,

they're full of fish.

Like, everything is just looking for a home.

For him to come here, for him to say that

the work we're doing is wonderful

and it's something that could be implemented in other places

in Cambodia,

for him to be so happy with the work that we've done,

tt's insanely wonderful.

All very good swimmers.

Swim from the deep.

Yeah, onto the front is probably the easiest.

And just around here is where Rachana made her reef.

So she's got the two big structure,

a small one, and then two lions like on the pier.

It looks very beautiful.

Rachana is basically the future and the hope of MCC in my mind.

Mind your toes, mind your feet.

Go on, out of the way. Come on Rachana,

I believe under her leadership

she will take MCC to a different level.

- 1,2,3!

- That allows us to do what we've done here

throughout the whole archipelago.

It's the beginning of full restoration.

It's the beginning of the beginning.

I'm just, I'm buzzing. It's brilliant.

- Yeah, yeah.

Thank you very, very much everybody

for being fucking wonderful!

Yes!

- For me, the great power of investigative journalism

is that it can make things change.

And, this new job gives me a much bigger platform

and more resources to keep reporting

the stories that don't get told.