company Mogeo on the application, which won the wireless government award at the FutureGov awards in Malaysia. The phone-in service 0800 4 POACHER (0800 476 224) continues, but 0800 4 RULES has been discontinued.
FORENSIC FIRST FINDS FINFISH FIEND
A scraping of paint on some fish scales and a bit of forensic science resulted in the conviction of commercial fisherman Ross Ian Harvey on September 12 of illegal dumping. Harvey pleaded guilty in the Tauranga District Court to being a party to the dumping of about 1000 snapper by West Coast Fishing Limited and was fined $27,000.
In a New Zealand first, the Ministry of Fisheries said forensic paint sampling had identified the location of Harvey's vessel, the commercial Danish seiner Garraway. The incident occurred on August 6, 2009 when Harvey was skipper of the Garraway. A local recreational fisher discovered the snapper floating about 4km north of the Ohiwa Harbour entrance in the eastern Bay of Plenty. The fisher provided a GPS position and Opotiki fishery officers who collected samples found they were all well over the minimum commercial size limit of 250mm. All legal size quota species must be landed and counted against the fisher's annual catch entitlement.
"The officers found blue paint embedded under the scales of two of the snapper," said the field operations manager for Poverty Bay, Tom Teneti. Staff at the University of Otago tested the paint and this contrib- uted to identifying the fish were from the Garraway. The data suggested that the paint found on the snapper and paint from the Garraway were of similar composition and were distinct from other samples obtained during the investigation. Electronic evidence taken from the vessel was also used to confirm she was in the vicinity when the fish were dumped. "A process of elimination was applied to make sure no other vessel could have been involved in the vicinity of the detected dumping," Teneti said.
SECRETARY IMPORTED FISH EGGS
The secretary of the New Zealand Killifish Association, Erling Jensen, has been fined $6000 plus $132 costs for importing fish eggs from Sweden and Denmark. Jensen, a 72-year-old engineer from Ohope, had earlier pleaded guilty in the Whakatane District Court to three counts of possessing and attempting to possess unauthorised goods, namely killifish eggs, laid by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) under the Biosecurity Act. The charges were laid after a parcel containing three small plastic bags containing fresh peat moss with killifish eggs was intercepted at the Auckland International Mail Centre in October 2010. When interviewed by MAF, Jensen admitted he knew bringing fish eggs into New Zealand without authority was illegal. He admitted he had at other times utilised false names at real
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January/February 2012 Professional Skipper 65
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