Away from family and friends for many months at a time, working long hours and navigating some of the world's most dangerous stretches of ocean, seafaring can be a tough, lonely and hazardous career.

Piracy, shipwreck, abandonment and separation from loved ones are just a few of the problems that seafarers and fishers cope with.

Fishers are involved in what is recognised as the most dangerous occupation in the world.

Seafarers transport 90 to 95% of the food and goods the world uses every day, and yet these 1.3 million hardworking men and women who face danger every day are often forgotten.

When aircraft crash we hear about it on the news; when ships sink, unless it's a cruise liner like the Costa Concordia, it's almost as if no one cares.

Shipwrecks and Piracy

Wikipedia lists 67 ships as ‘sunk, foundered, grounded or otherwise lost' in 2012. Twenty-five of those shipwrecks resulted in the loss of at least 943 lives, and probably many more.

Seafarers are constantly threatened by pirates. Between January and 23 May this year, there were 106 incidents reported of ships being attacked, including four hijackings and Somali pirates were holding 71 hostages and 5 vessels.

During 2012 297 ships were attacked by pirates, 174 were boarded, 28 were hijacked and 28 were fired upon. The number of people taken hostage onboard was 585 and a further 26 were kidnapped for ransom in Nigeria. Six crew members were killed and 32 were injured or assaulted. (Information from http://www.icc-ccs.org/)

Stella Maris — an official Ministry of the Church

Under the guidance and protection of Mary, Star of the Sea, the Apostleship of the Sea (AoS) cares for the fishers and seafarers that visit our ports.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, AoS ministers to those who work at sea and in our ports in Auckland, Wellington, Tauranga Moana and Napier. It is in the process opening or re-opening branches in other NZ ports. Continue reading

Sources

• Marist Messenger
• Image: Apostleship of the Sea GB

We believe that God and his principles in the first pages of his Bible must get the place of honour where the ecological debate takes place. It's a hot item that touches the whole world very emotionally. It's our mission to bring God's Words to the attention of the policymakers. 50 years ago, the Council Fathers emphasized the fact that "the greater man's power becomes, the farther his responsibility extends", and that every human activity is to correspond, according to the design and will of God, to humanity's true good."(C.S.D. 457) What are God's Biblical principles in his call to fishermen for responsible fishing? In this article, we attempt to put together some Biblical considerations.

The call for ecological awareness

"If we continue like this, there will be disasters on our planet." Such words seem to come from the last book of the Bible. But not the angels blow the trumpets of the apocalypse. It is the climatologists and ecologists. Now, after the onset of globalization, the fishermen face an environmental challenge. Consumers and international fishery factories heard the call of nature lovers. The demand for ecological awareness in dealing with all creation, and in particular in dealing with sustainable food harvesting from the sea, is becoming urgent. The older generations in fishery consider environmental problems as naturally occurring defects of nature, grossly exaggerated by the media. Younger fishermen look at it differently.They ask: what's going on? It seems as though nature does not regulate itself anymore. "Man is the culprit", one calls. In the old days we could harvest, pick, fish and feast without restriction. Nature was no concern. Now it seems that nature is out of balance, and that nature has come to depend upon our help. Continue reading

Sources

• Fr Dirk Demaeght, Apostleship of the Sea, Belgium International Christian Maritime Association
• Image: Scoop