As an official Cocos Island volunteer, one of my routine duties is to accompany rangers on patrol. We are searching for illegal fishing vessels lurking inside the Cocos Island boundary. Most often these patrols occur the middle of the night and on the windward side of the island where the water can be very rough. After spotting a boat, we first make sure the vessel leaves the park waters. Since many fishermen have already cast their lines into the water, we must act quickly to remove them from the water.
Sometimes the lines are challenging to locate, but as soon as we find them, we haul out as fast as possible to stop the process of animals being hooked, and to hopefully save any animals already on the line. This process can be heart-wrenching as you drag out the struggling and often dead animals and it is a contradiction that this the process happens against the beautiful background of the gleaming bioluminescence in the ocean that continues until it meets the clean, clear star-filled night sky.
Dolphins surround the boat and we can see the faint glimmer of the island in the distance. Once the net hauling is completed all is quiet and I am immersed in nature and realized that once, long ago, the entire earth was this beautiful, this pure.
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