Gillnet and Longline Bust in Belize’s Southern Waters

Protecting Belize’s waters is a never-ending fight, and this week, the Belize Territorial Volunteers say they scored another win. While heading out to the Sapodilla Cayes on Tuesday morning, the group spotted something unusual, a bottle bobbing in the water. But what they found next was far more troubling, a massive Guatemalan gillnet, illegally set inside Belizean waters. The net stretched nearly four hundred feet, threatening marine life and our resources. The volunteers didn’t hesitate; they hauled it out and destroyed it on the spot. Elsewhere in our southern waters, over three miles of illegal longline gear was also seized on Tuesday, just five miles from Barranco. The Belize Coast Guard says the deep-sea setup, baited hooks strung along a main line, was found after repeated offenses in the area. They’re now ramping up patrols near the Belize/Guatemala border to protect our marine resources. We spoke with Coast Guard Commandant Elton Bennett for more on this latest discovery.

 

Rear Admiral Elton Bennett, Commandant, Belize Coast Guard

“For this year, we have confiscated over forty-five feet of bill net, and ninety percent of this is along that area, along the southern maritime border, between the Sapodilla Cayes and the Sarstoon, so we are very active down there last year. The statistics was seven thousand feet of gill net, and we thought that was alarming. Over this year, we’ve been able to recover over four to five thousand feet. You would ask what is going on? What’s the reason for this? And we attribute this to the amount of patrols that we’re doing, particularly in the South because we are patrolling more regular and we are conducting more intelligence driven operations, we’ve been able to deter a lot of these activities where we’ve also been able to seize quite a few of these nets and we’ve detained quite a few individuals both Guatemala and Hondurans, that would be illegal fishing and what we determine to be your internal waters. So, we’ve been very active in terms of deterring and interdicting, an arrest where we can, those illegal fishers our southern waters.”

 

It’s a stark reminder of the constant vigilance needed to safeguard our seas.