May 22, 2020 — Liz Mitchell was on her laptop in her living room in Eugene, Oregon, when she got the news. Thousands of miles away, on a Taiwanese fishing boat, a fishery observer named Eritara Aati Kaierua had been found dead.
Details were scant. The ship’s name (Win Far No 636), the dead man’s passport number, and where the boat was now headed: the port of Kiribati, a central Pacific island nation on the equator.
But for Mitchell, president of the Association of Professional Observers (APO), it was sadly nothing new – another death, devoid of facts.
“We’ve recorded one or two deaths of fishery observers every year since 2015,” says Mitchell. “All with the same outcome: no information.”