By Edgar Feliciano
Fleet & Operations Manager, Feli Fisheries Inc., Pago Pago, American Samoa

On the evening of 9 July, maritime trackers with the Tuvalu Police Force noticed something impossible.

A vessel they were watching was broadcasting its position over the Automatic Identification System — the same system every legitimate ship at sea uses so we do not run into one another in the dark. The signal placed the vessel near the equator. But the coordinates did not merely misplace it. Read together, the latitude and longitude it transmitted would have put that ship somewhere off the surface of the planet.

That is not a malfunction. That is a spoof — a scrambled signal, deliberately transmitted, so a vessel can work in the dark and no one watching a screen can say where it truly is.

When Tuvaluan officers reached the ship, they found the Chinese longliner *Lu Rong Yuan Yu 138* fishing in Tuvaluan waters at night with its navigation lights switched off. Its fishing authorisation had expired. There were piles of tuna aboard. And as the boarding party came up, crew members were throwing shark carcasses over the side. The logbooks went back months without a single shark entered — in a fishery where every shark taken as bycatch must be recorded, every time.

The captain and crew were arrested. The vessel was escorted to Funafuti.

That should be the end of the story: a small nation enforced its law and it worked. But it is not the end of the story, because of how Tuvalu made that arrest.

They borrowed the boat.

Tuvalu’s only patrol vessel, the “Te Mataili II”, was destroyed by cyclones. So Tuvaluan police went out to make that arrest aboard the “Allankay”, a ship owned by Sea Shepherd — a conservation charity. The Forum Fisheries Agency has confirmed it had no involvement in the arrangement. A sovereign nation, exercising police powers inside its own exclusive economic zone, from the deck of an NGO’s vessel, because it had nothing else to sail.

Sea Shepherd deserves credit. Tuvalu’s officers deserve more. But every one of us in this region should sit with that image for a long moment, because it is the truest picture of Pacific maritime enforcement anyone has drawn this year.

Tuvalu did not have a problem. Tuvalu had a witness.

Let me say plainly what I hope no one takes away from this story: that this was a Tuvalu incident.

It was not. It happened in Tuvaluan waters because that is where somebody happened to be looking. This behaviour — dark vessels, spoofed positions, expired papers, unreported sharks, transshipment out of sight of any authority — is not an isolated event in one small EEZ. It runs the length and breadth of the South Pacific, night after night, in waters belonging to nations that have no realistic means of knowing it is happening.

Tuvalu did not catch a rare offender. Tuvalu caught one. The difference between those two sentences is the entire problem.

For every vessel boarded, how many finished the trip? How many turned the lights back on, corrected the transponder, offloaded at a cooperative port, and sold the catch into a supply chain that never asked a question? Nobody in this region can answer that honestly, and that silence is itself the answer.

And I will not pretend American Samoa is better positioned than Tuvalu. We are not.

We are a small territory sitting beside one of the largest exclusive economic zones under the American flag, and we do not have the surface assets, the crewed patrol capability, or the persistent surveillance to police it ourselves. Our EEZ, the waters around Swains and Rose Atoll, the monument areas — these are vast, remote, and for most of the year effectively unwatched. We depend on federal partners whose assets are stretched across an ocean that swallows them. Sector patrols are episodic. Aerial coverage is thin. Detection often comes after the fact, if it comes at all.

If a vessel chose tonight to do in our waters exactly what the *Lu Rong Yuan Yu 138* did in Tuvalu’s, I have very little confidence we would know. That is not a criticism of the men and women who serve here. It is arithmetic.

The asymmetry is the point
I have run a longline operation out of Pago Pago for the better part of thirty years. I want to be very clear about what compliance costs on our side of the ledger.

Our vessels carry Vessel Monitoring Systems that report our position whether we like it or not. We carry observers. We carry electronic monitoring. We log our catch, our bycatch, our sets, our interactions with protected species. We are inspected, audited, closed out of grounds, and held to catch limits set through a public process. When we get something wrong, there are consequences, and there should be.

Now weigh that against a vessel that turns off its lights, falsifies its position to a point that does not exist on earth, fishes on expired papers, and dumps the evidence over the rail as police approach.

That is not competition. That is not two fleets working the same ocean under the same rules. It is a race in which one runner is timed, drug-tested and scrutinized, and the other is not required to stay on the track.

And the cost is not borne by Beijing. It is borne by the tuna stocks our children inherit, by the shark populations that hold this ecosystem together, and by every family in this territory whose income depends on a fishery that stays healthy.

Follow the sequence
The single arrest is not the whole picture. Look at the sequence.

Concessional loans and grants arrive across our region for nations with narrow revenue bases, no industrial economy, and no realistic prospect of repayment. This is not hidden. Analysts have been direct that China’s interests in the Pacific run to fisheries, logging and deep-sea minerals, alongside votes at the United Nations and the peeling away of Taiwan’s remaining partners here.

When there is no cash to service the debt, payment is taken in what we actually hold. Land. Ports. Access. Fish.

Meanwhile, on the water, the fleet operates as the *Lu Rong Yuan Yu 138* operated. Rules are a matter of enforcement risk, not obligation. Where enforcement capacity is thin — and in most of our EEZs it is desperately thin — the risk approaches zero.

I do not say this out of hostility toward any people. I say it because I have read the sequence too many times to pretend I cannot see it.

What we owe ourselves
Our Pacific leaders are not passive. Our nations have negotiated hard and used this competition to widen their partnerships and improve their terms. That is real, and it is smart. But leverage means nothing if we cannot see who is in our waters, and it means less if we cannot reach them.

So the work in front of us is concrete:

• Assets that belong to us- Patrol capability that is ours, crewed by our own officers, resilient enough to survive the cyclone season. Australia’s Pacific Maritime Security Program and our partnerships with the United States, New Zealand and Japan matter enormously here — but the asset has to end up in Pacific hands, and it has to be maintained.
• Monitoring, control and surveillance with teeth-AIS spoofing should be treated as the offence it is. Dark vessels, transshipment at sea, and expired authorizations should trigger automatic consequences at the port and at the market.
• Port-state measures that actually bite-A fish that cannot be landed or sold is a fish that is not worth stealing.
• Regional coordination, not fragmentation-FFA, PNA, WCPFC, SPRFMO — our strength has always been that we act together on our tuna. That solidarity is the asset no distant-water fleet can buy.
• Read the whole contract-To every leader signing an agreement over our land, our seabed, or our fish: the resource you commit is not yours. It belongs to the generation coming up behind you, and they will read the fine print even if we did not.

Tuvalu did something admirable this month with almost nothing to work with. But the lesson is not that the system worked. The lesson is how close it came to not working at all, and how many nights across this ocean — including ours — there is simply no one out there to look.

One arrest made the news. The rest of them sail home.

Our tuna and our lands are not collateral.