Native fisherman in the surf paradise of Mentawais in Indonesia have been fishing using improvised explosives and the surf world has sent out the call to end this destructive practice. Over the past week surf resort owners, professional surfers like Kelly Slater as well as surfers world-wide have been banding together to hopefully end this practice, which is quickly destroying the beautiful reefs of the Metawais. Once destroyed it can take thousands upon thousands of years for a reef to rebuild itself, so this is clearly an issue that needs to be dealt with ASAP!
Surfer Magazine has just released a feature article that says in part (full article here):
Like shooting fish in a barrel. If that barrel was made of one of the world’s most precious reefs. And if by shooting you mean throwing homemade bombs that leave craters 3 yards in diameter and kill all living things near it. So yes, what’s going on in the Mentawais right now is just like shooting fish in a barrel. As idiotic as that is.
“For over a month now, the Playgrounds area has had at least three boats bombing our reefs every day,” says the owner of one of the surf resorts in the area. “When the weather is good, they can do more than five cycles of bombing and collecting the dead fish in a day. Each cycle is between five to eight bombs. Calculating a low average, we estimate more than 2,250 bombs have been exploded in our 15-mile radius area.”
The owner of another nearby resort is equally disturbed: “Countless animals and acres of coral have been killed. It was a sad day for me personally when the dugong that has been living around the resort for years washed up on the beach dead after a boat’s bomb attack.”
“Every time the surf season ends these guys descend,” says Jess Ponting, Director of the Center for Surf Research at SDSU. “It seems more concentrated this year, but perhaps they are just working closer to the surf resorts, or perhaps there are now more surf resorts, where people see it and are horrified by it. These are very remote islands and normally they just get away with it. This is being done on a commercial scale by people from the Sumatran mainland (most likely Sibolga) over a hundred miles away. This is not poor local fishermen feeding their families on a subsistence level.”
Kelly Slater sent out word via Instagram earlier this week
Witness the destruction for yourself:
via Surflife.com:
So far there have been meetings between stakeholders, heads of districts and heads of the fisheries department, but there has yet to be anything done to stop them. So what can you do to help?
A petition has been set up, and naturally the more people who sign it the harder it becomes for authorities to ignore. Obviously this is not a solution to the problem, but the petition is the first step in the right direction.
For anyone who has ever surfed the perfect waves of the Mentawais, or would one day like to, we can't encourage you strongly enough to get along to https://www.change.org/mentawaibombs to do your bit for one of the wonders of the surfing world.
So click that link to the petition above (or right HERE) and lend you hand to protect an amazing place special to surfers and lovers of the world in general alike.
