Flying Sharks and Canary Aquatic in Morocco!

It’s been a long and gruelling process, beginning back in October 2020, but we take great pleasure in celebrating this year’s World Oceans Day by sharing that our EEA Grants “Mobile Station” project finally took to the road and helped us deliver 850 critters to the Al Hoceima Aquarium (in Morocco) with water quality like we’ve never experienced before!

To give you an idea, we typically dosed our tanks with approximately 200 grams of pH buffers and/or awesome Blue Shark ammonia quenchers on each stop. This time we used 10 times less. That’s how good water quality was over 4 days of transport, that took us from Peniche to Sevilla for the weekend, twelve hours in Algeciras, two hours crossing to Tangiers, eight hours of customs procedures and finally an eight hours drive to Al Hoceima.

Our last segment included quite a few adventures, beginning with the fact that the weekend we spent in Sevilla kindly showered us with 47°C (!), which truly put our refrigerating 40 foot shipping container to the ultimate test – which was passed with flying colors!

Secondly, a little admin SNAFU at Cádiz Customs may very well cost us a 17.000 euros deposit, but we’re working hard on that one and we sincerely appreciate everyone’s positive energy, thoughts and prayers!

Thirdly, because we always used a refrigerated truck in all previous three shipments, we kind of forgot to mention to our customs agents that, this time, the animals were traveling inside a refrigerated container, which has its own registration number. Fixing that small oversight added two more hours of fun at Tangiers Customs, which we would have cleared in a record six hours if it weren’t for that minor detail. But hey, we’re marine biologists and, despite the fact that we can handle many things with duct tape and a Leatherman, we’re simply not aware of all the admin minutiae in the exciting world of import/export.

But the real fun came a few minutes before midnight on Monday, June 2nd, when we were merely one hour away from Al Hoceima. A landslide in the main road forced us to take a detour on a road that landed our truck onto a ridiculously steep hill-from-hell, which made our powerful Scania’s wheels spin, and the truck slowly slide towards the dark precipice on the side of the road! Luckily, we had our usual kickass driver Armando Pereira behind the wheel, who saved us, and the fish, from disaster!

After four failed attempts, we consolidated our fish from two tanks into one and threw 3 tons of saltwater on the side of the road. This effort was sadly not enough, so we consolidated even one more tank into others, losing an additional 3 tons. As we prepared for our sixth attempt, a badass tractor from the nearby town of El Jebha joined and towed us up two impossible turns (see video below).

As usual, we pulled up to our friend Gonçalo around 3 AM and offloaded our animals quickly and efficiently, checking in at the La Pêrla Hotel for a whopping 3 hours of sleep, before driving back home. Still, despite the tiredness and exhaustion, the team enjoyed a couple of rounds of gin and vodka tonics on the ferry back to Algeciras, which was a moment we’d all been manifesting on our minds for months!

In the end, this operation felt truly special not only because it was our fourth run to Al Hoceima, and our impressive Mobile Station’s maiden voyage, but also because we joined efforts with Canary Aquatic Live Animals, who sailed the vast majority of fish from Las Palmas to Cádiz, and then drove them to Sevilla, where they were transferred from a standard aquaculture truck to our spectacular Transport Unit.

One of these days we’ll write a far more detailed report on this impressive journey but suffice it to say that our Mobile Station’s performance far exceeded our wildest expectations!

We’ll say goodbye (for now) with a very special thanks to our client Posidony and our awesome partner Canary Aquatic Live Animals, our friends from Acuario de Sevilla, our five (!) customs agents from Lisbon, Las Palmas, Cádiz, Algeciras and Tangiers, our spectacular trucking company TPO, our friend & client Aaron Sprowl for joining this special occasion and taking awesome photos and video, and, obviously, our phenomenal team, who spared no effort in creating the finest fish moving unit ever created on this planet, with a huge thank you to the brains behind it all, Rui Guedes, and his team of engineers, António Pires, Nuno Machado, João Machado and the boys and girls from Ventiplast. Thank you all for your unwavering support and efforts during these five long years and, of course, a special note of thanks to EEA Portugal and DGPM, our funding and regulatory agencies.

PS – We almost forgot to thank our glorious two Audi A4s, one with 865.000 km under the hood, and the other catching up fast at 580.000 km!

#EEAGrants #EEAGrantsPT #EEANorwayGrants #CrescimentoAzul #BlueGrowth #DGPM

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