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On this voyage there are 34 people aboard the Southern Surveyor, 17 ship operating crew and 17 scientific and technical crew. The ship operation members are employed by the ship’s management company, P&O Maritime Services. It includes the master, three engineers including the chief engineer, two officers (who also take charge of the fishing operations) two cooks (chief cook and second cook), a chief steward, a bosun and eight able seamen. The scientific crew consists of the chief scientist and 11 other scientists, plus technicians that are part of the ship’s support group. They take care of electronics, the data centre and hydrochemistry.

Don McKenzie

Don McKenzie is the operations officer for the Southern Surveyor. That covers all the logistics of the voyage, from buying the fuel, to cleaning the mussels off the mooring lines! Don oversees the needs of the scientific participants, such as their equipment and safety, and liaises on their behalf with the ship’s management company, P&O Maritime Services. He also works with the ship’s electronics, computing and hydrochemistry support teams to ensure the smooth installation and operation of on-board scientific instruments.

Four days before the Southern Surveyor set out from Hobart, Don was pacing Princes Wharf, mobile phone at the ready. The ship’s new $40,000 trawl net was proving difficult to load, and a clutch of seabed-sampling devices was corralled along the wharf, awaiting their lift aboard before the crane operator clocked off for the day. At the ship’s stern, scuba diver’s prepared to escort to its berth beneath the hull the ship’s VIP passenger, the 100 KHz Simrad EM 1002 multibeam swath mapping instrument. With one eye on these operations, Don checked the status of an emergency diesel delivery. Tomorrow would bring a price rise of four-cents a litre, and that can make a big difference when your fuel comes by the tonne!

Roger Pepper

No one knows the Southern Surveyor better than Roger Pepper. He skippered the vessel, then known as the Kurd, in the 1970s, when it was a ‘fish-catching freezer’ operating off Iceland, Greenland, Spitsbergen and Newfoundland.

Roger, who hails from East Yorkshire in the UK, says the main fisheries back then were haddock and cod, and he must have known where to find them. In 1975, he won an English Rose Bowl Award for catching more fish than anyone else. ‘We used to have 48 people on the ship because of all the work to do,’ Roger says. ‘It was a fish factory then: all the fish caught were filleted on board and packed into freezers.’

Roger came to Australia to skipper a prawn trawler in 1980 following a downturn in the UK fishing industry. He worked out of Perth, in the Gulf of Carpentaria. In the meantime, the Kurd was refitted as a dive-support vessel and went to work in the North Sea.

In 1985, Roger joined the company that operated the Soela, the predecessor to Southern Surveyor. When the Surveyor was brought to Australia for it’s second reincarnation as a research vessel, he joined the ship again, this time as fishing master and first officer. He says the reunion was ‘pure coincidence’.

When the Surveyor trawls for fish, Roger and the second officer, John Boyes, oversee the operation. Roger controls the trawl from the bridge where he can adjust both the depth and spread of the net, and the speed and direction of the ship. While doing this he keeps an eye on acoustic and echo sounding? instruments that display the depth and condition of the seabed, the position of the net, and the location of schools of fish.

Roger says he still enjoys the fishing, but that it’s interesting to learn about the fisheries from ‘the other side’. And anyway, he reckons he’s mellowed over the years, ‘lost that killer instinct’.

Like many of the crew, Roger believes the need for the information gathered by the scientists is vital. ‘I feel that each Australian State should have one (a research vessel)’ he says. ‘The future of fishing is a big thing for Australia, particularly the deep-water fisheries. Information about them has been too slow getting to fishers.’

Karen Gowlett-Holmes

Karen Gowlett-Holmes, the ship’s onboard invertebrate specialist, is responsible for recording the benthic sampling and interpreting the underwater videos. She tries to photograph all the specimens on board in order to capture their true colours and forms. Karen says samples of each species are preserved for later study by taxonomic specialists, usually at state museums where permanent biodiversity collections are maintained