Research Fund 24/04 :: Pedro Santos
May 1, 2024
Research Fund 24/04 :: Beatriz Monteiro
May 4, 2024
When we returned from the first delivery in Gdynia, on the trip from 14 to 18 March, our absolute priority was to ensure that our badass truck that would make the second delivery would arrive fully stocked in Gdynia before the 19th of April, opening date of a new exhibit in this Polish city’s aquarium. More than half of the animals had already been secured by our Azorean and Peniche teams, but we were anxious to learn when would Tunipex begin its fishing, since we were relying on our set-net friends for mackerel, Scomber scombrus, and horse mackerel, Trachurus trachurus. A phone call with awesome Captain Alfredo revealed that this would happen at the end of March, with the first day of fishing scheduled for Monday, April 8. That meant zero possibility of a window for stabilizing between collection and shipping, since Marcin, our client, asked if we could arrive to Gdynia on the 12th, and we already knew that the trip would take 5 days.
That meant departing Olhão on the 7th of April, while fishing would only commence on the 8th. Oops. It doesn’t take an enormous understanding of quantum mechanics to realize this was simply not possible.
A few days later I called Alfredo again to implore him to start fishing as soon as humanly possible and was surprised by the excellent news that the net was already soaking in the water and the first day of fishing would be Thursday, April 4! “Yes!!” I thought to myself, since this meant that the day of departure could be set for exactly one week later, the 11th, which would put us in Gdynia on the 17th, just two days before the opening of the new exhibition on the 19th. This did not make Marcin entirely happy, and justifiably so, but hey, it was the absolute best we could do, since collection with Tunipex was an indispensable part of the process and we simply couldn’t leave for Gdynia without the fish collected by our set-net friends. Nor without at least one week of recovery after collection.
It should be noted that this opening date had already been postponed by two weeks, after I explained to Marcin that I wouldn’t be able to get the fish from Tunipex until the beginning of April. If it hadn’t been for that lifesaving postponement, we’d have been in deep trouble, because the contract said that the animals had to be delivered before the exhibit opened. Then again, the contract didn’t include the opening date of the exhibit, a detail that did not go unnoticed and which I kept in the bank of important information.
Meanwhile, Alfredo’s excellent news was counterbalanced by some bad news from Patricia, the former curator of the Poema del Mar aquarium in Gran Canaria, who had an impressive batch of sharks and rays in the Canaries that were due to leave for us in a 36 hours ferry trip for Cádiz on April 4 and then begin stabilization at our warehouse in Peniche on the 6th of April. However, a furious storm hit the Macaronesia region, and the shipment of these animals was delayed by a full week! They would therefore have to leave the Canaries on the 11th and arrive in Cádiz on the 12th, which meant that Patricia’s lorry would meet ours at the Seville aquarium and transfer the animals to our truck already on its way to Poland. Certainly not an ideal scenario, but what can one do against the powerful forces of nature and a fixed opening exhibit date?
Marcin wasn’t particularly happy about all these delays – neither were we -, but the animals would arrive at the aquarium two days before the opening and nothing else mattered.
Throughout this whole ordeal, one additional giant concern persisted, which was the size of the Mustelus mustelus smooth-hounds supplied by Patricia, whose weights oscillated between 8 and 15 kilos, which put a lot of biomass on our backs – and in the transport tanks. The calculations we made gave figures well above 20 kilos per cubic metre, which is our psychological – as well as ‘technical’ – limit, so I began to consider various scenarios, including hiring Patricia’s truck that would come from the Canaries, to follow ours to Poland. Of course, this would cost a lot of money, but it would ensure that the animals arrived in good condition, which was by far the most important thing. After all, there’s really not much point in arriving to a client with moribund animals, both from an ethical and financial perspectives…
However, when I put this scenario to Patricia, she replied shortly afterwards that the lorry wasn’t available, which threw me back into a sea of worry and anxiety that culminated in an embarrassing episode on Wednesday, the 3rd of April. I was on my way to do some teaching in Peniche when, at half past eight, I was approaching Lourinhã. A traffic light on the road was holding up traffic because of some road works, forcing only one line of cars to pass at a time. I took advantage of the red light to send an audio to our TechAquarium whatsapp group, which was also giving me occasional headaches. And it was just as I started recording the audio that my inwards gave me a violent twinge, signalling the urgency of finding a toilet quickly.
I waited patiently for the light to turn green and sped off to a café a few kilometres ahead, where I had made a similar stop a few years before.
Of course, the journey to the café was painful, with cold sweats on my arms and tremors in my legs, such was the urgency of the situation, which begged for a quick resolution. This wasn’t the first time I’d experienced a crisis of this nature, but it had been many years since I’d faced one of equivalent severity. It was then that I caught a glimpse of the café at the end of the road and threw the car into a parking spot in front, walking up the ramp that led to the entrance at a slow but controlled pace. Because you never know.
I was politely asking the gentleman behind the counter “Can I use your toilet?” when I felt something slip out of my grasp, fervently praying that it was just gas. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
This cruel realisation forced me to spend some time on the maintenance required when an accident of this nature occurs, my first in 51 years of life.
I remedied the situation as best I could in ten minutes, rushing afterwards to Computer Room 5 at the school in Peniche, where I gave a relatively simple exercise on estimating the maximum sustainable fishing level to my Marine Resource Management students. I took advantage of the fact that the lesson was easy and snuck out a few minutes before it ended, using that short break between two classes to buy myself a pair of jeans in MO, where the Continente chain offers cheap clothing for those in need of a quick fix, which was definitely my case. At first, I was annoyed by the tight jeans I tried on, which fit well above my ankles, before the girls in the shop politely pointed out that they were ladies’ trousers and gave me a more masculine option.
It still took me a while to get the cut right, because they only gave me options that fit far too snug for my taste, or perhaps I had become too bulky over time. During this process of trial and error I appreciated the fact that the jeans I was originallywearing showed no evidence of the morning incident, which even led me to consider the need to purchase the new garment at all. However, since I was already there, I thought I’d take advantage of the friendly price of 19 euros and 99 cents, leaving with a brand-new pair of jeans, fully identical to the one I wore that morning because, after all, I didn’t want the students to notice my little mishap. At least not until I put it out in words, for the whole world to read.
That morning’s anxiety was relieved by a quick lunch with Nuno and David, during which we discussed the distribution of the fish in the six tanks that we were going to take on the lorry, and it became clear that the excessive size of Patricia’s smooth-hounds was going to be a problem. And a serious one.
However, my traditional good fortune came to our aid on Sunday, 7 April, when a phone call with Patricia reassured me of the abundance of dogfish, Squalus acanthias, that she had recently caught, all weighing less than a kilo! Oh, the supreme and blissful joy on that glorious Sunday! I quickly indicated that I would keep only the two smallest Mustelus (weighing around 5 kilos) and would take no less than ten Squalus to Poland with us. By adding these dozen animals to the two Germanic Mustelus born in our friend Nicole’s aquarium and delivered a month earlier, Marcin would have 14 little sharks in his tank, two more than the dozen he wanted. Not bad. Not bad at all, and this piece of excellent news actually allowed me to enjoy Sunday evening with some (relative) peace with my family.
Monday, 8 April
We were all in an exceptional good mood when David and Nuno arrived at my door at half past six on Monday morning to go diving in the Algarve with Miguel, a new partner who looked very promising. Nuno had recently met this young Marine Biology graduate, who was hungry for opportunities to demonstrate his skills, so accompanying Flying Sharks on its mission to fill reputable aquariums with Lusitanian fish immediately appealed to him. And we loved his enthusiasm – and impressive list of potential species to be collected – as well.
The only problem that day – there seemed to be at least one different problem every single freakin’ day, back then… – was that the weather was supposed to be favourable to our beautiful endeavour, but we were pounded by rain from Lisbon all the way to our dive site, three hours away in the Algarve.
Once we got there, the goal was to catch some wrasses that were destined for Poland and some highly specialised invertebrates, such as Parazoanthus, Aiptasia and other bizarre creatures, that were going to a small aquarium in Germany. Nuno would take on these complex invertebrates, with a hammer and chisel in his hands, while David and I would fill a small plastic drum with the required fish. We hung outside the drum a small writing board on which we could write down the fish we had caught, to ensure that we didn’t return to land with an excess of some species and a shortage of others.
Needless to say, all the nervousness caused by the bad weather, pounding waves, strong winds and furiously rocking boat, the proximity of the Polish trip and the lack of some animals so close to the departure date, left me in my all too familiar state of anxiety, which turned into an immediate expulsion of the contents of my intestines the very instant I fell into the water… The good thing is that, unlike my professional comrades, who wore warm dry suits, yours truly was wearing a semi-dry suit, which had me chilled to be bone but at least the Algarve Sea could enter – and exit – freely my neoprene garments, slowly washing away the perniciously slimy content that had escaped me – again.
There may have been a time in my life when the shame of such an occurrence would have paralysed me with embarrassment. At the age of 51 and with so much adventure on my CV, I completely ignored it and focussed on catching fish in very cold water, which was seeping through the holes in my gloves and the poorly applied sealant around my neck. At the end of the dive, I signalled to our dive-master that I was going up, because the air pressure in my tank was already below 50 bars and, with 18 metres of water above me, prudence dictated that I head for the surface, where I arrived a few minutes later, after a calm and very controlled ascent. With everything going on, who the hell needs to spend a few hours in the recompression chamber for fixing a sloppy ascent??
Once at the surface, I realised that I was the last one out of the water, which pleased me because, despite my mishap and nervousness, my air consumption was still lower than average, as it usually is when I’m diving. Approaching the boat, I handed my weight belt and air tank to Nuno, asking him to unzip the back of my suit. I also alerted him to the need to keep his nose out of the process and, knowing full well the worries that plagued me, the young man immediately realised that my incident on Wednesday had been repeated on that rainy Algarvian morning. A practical chap, he reminded me of the importance of also taking off my boots, which I did immediately, allowing the water to flow freely in and out of my suit, which, I hoped, would be reasonably clean by the time we reached land.
This process, however, still took a while because, although we were very successful in catching all the fish and most invertebrates, the evil Aiptasia stubbornly refused to show their faces, so Nuno wisely suggested a second dive in an area closer to land and with a greater chance of success. David’s face didn’t hide the fact that the Algarve Sea hadn’t agreed with his stomach, especially during his period of intermittent fasting, when his belly didn’t even offer anything to regurgitate when the convulsions hit, a process that I know all too well and is intensely painful.
So, we headed for land, not least because I was literally freezing to death. However, Nuno’s (legitimate) insistence on the importance of returning with our mission fully accomplished pushed my efficiency button, so we stopped at the designated place and, although David and I were prostrated at the sight of dropping in the tumultuous freezing sea for a second time, Nuno’s rugged nature had the young dive-master jump into the water with him and, a few minutes later, both returned with the critters we needed to close the order! Well done, boys!
It wasn’t long before we were back on dry land, at last, me holding a hose deep inside my suit before stripping completely and checking that there was no trace of my recent turmoil, which pleased me. We then packed up the two boxes we had taken with our newly acquired animals and put the rest in an aquarium belonging to our new friend Miguel.
Some half an hour later we were filling up on chicken and ice-cold Coca Cola Zero, followed by the return journey to Lisbon and the delivery of the boxes to UPS, a good 45 minutes before their cut-off time. Despite all difficulties, this had been a very productive day and the conversation in the car reassured everyone of the guaranteed success of the operation ahead, which made me park and take the elevator home with a blissful smile on my face.
Wednesday, 10 April
That day I had lunch with David in Peniche and, once again, we carefully reviewed our packing-plan for Poland with my laptop between our lunch plates, rearranging our multiple sharks, rays, and mackerel between the various tanks, ensuring that none exceeded the limit of 20 kilos of biomass per cubic metre of water. It wasn’t an easy task, but for good reason, which was that our friends at Tunipex had just caught the missing 800 beautiful horse mackerel, Trachurus trachurus, we needed just three days before departure! Of course, transporting animals with so little stabilization time wasn’t ideal, but we would arrive at our five clients with everything they asked for, which was an extraordinary feat. Logistically and financially. Ah yes, because I planned four more deliveries around the Polish trip, with one stop at L’Ocearium du Croisic, then Nausicaá in Boulogne-sur-mer, Haus des Meeres in Vienna, and finally Tropicarium in Budapest, before the final stretch to the Gdynia Aquarium in Poland.
The planning of the whole exercise was nothing short of amazing and it would have our truck driving nearly 10.000 kilometres, but the financial efficiency of such a trip was one of the multiple reasons behind Flying Sharks’ nearly 18 years of success. Still, we knew that we were stretching ourselves a little too thin, which is why our calculations were repeated again and again, until every single member of the team felt comfortable with our packing and traveling plans.
Thursday, 11 April
Thursday was the day the transport began, originally transporting multiple animals we had in Peniche to Olhão, after several days of preparing the (refrigerated) galley of a semi-truck with the support of a small army of my students, organised by David.
The day’s morning was relatively quiet, with several emails and the traditional torrada at senhor Zé with Nina and Nikola, a delightful Portuguese breakfast habit that soothes my nerves. Nothing like a warm piece of toasted bread with butter, and a nice hot glass of coffee with milk, to relax one’s spirit before a storm.
At half past noon I set off to teach a single class in Peniche, an annoying aspect with this semester’s schedule, which offered me no less than eleven days where I have to drive 200 kilometres and spend three hours in the car to teach a single class. Great. What would Greta Thunberg say about that, considering the school is lined with stickers about Reducing-Reusing-Recycling and Circular Economy?… Anyway, I digress…
During that day’s lesson I saw a missed call from Ana Mendes, from the IPMA facility in Olhão, where we keep the fish collected by Tunipex. I made a mental note to call her straight after finishing the class, but my blood froze when I saw a text saying “Call me urgently”.
“‘That’s nice…” I thought, regretting the audacity of having allowed myself some comfort in the previous 24 hours, when everything finally seemed to be under control.
I took a deep breath before pressing the green button and prepared myself for the worst, realising that the transport had already begun, as the lorry carrying the rays and other fish from Peniche was already on its way to Olhão. At the same time, the lorry with the sharks and rays from the Canary Islands was already at sea, on its way to Cádiz and then Sevilla Aquarium.
Ana answered with the most fearsome phrase of all: “João, are you sitting down?”
“Let’s hear it…” I said, and then asked “…but just tell me: do we have fish to send tomorrow?” “Yes, we do” she replied, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “But…” she added… “I knew it…” I thought… “But?” I asked…
“The sole (Solea senegalensis) are having some kind of problem and we’ve already lost five. Do you think you can go with some of ours, even though they have a chip on them?” “Of course!” I replied, thanking the heavens for the tiny magnitude of the problem! If it was just the lack of half a dozen sole in an order of hundreds of fish, we’d be doing just fine! “But wait…” she said. “…there’s more”, and I braced for what was coming…
“Everything’s fine with the mackerel…” she said. “Whew!” I thought… “But…” “Oh shit…” my brain said… “…there’s been some bad luck with the horse mackerel…” “Fuck me…” I thought… “How many were lost?…” and I held my breath.
“All of them.”
And that was that.
We had the 500 Scomber, the sharks, the rays, the little wrasses, and a whole host of other fish, but the 300 Trachurus for L’Ocearium du Croisic and 500 for the Gdynia Aquarium had gone up in smoke. Just like that. And just like that, all of a sudden, I found myself faced with the need to spend an additional 25.000 euros on yet another trip to bring those missing Trachurus in a subsequent transport. That was quite an expensive phone call.
I didn’t even really hear what happened, it was just some silly thing related to a faulty oxygen valve… The only question I asked was “Do you think we can catch more tomorrow morning?” “The weather is bad, but let’s see.” Ana offered unenthusiastically.
It was with these thoughts in mind that I sent off another half a dozen emails after class, before meeting Zé Pedro at warehouse 61, where I found him with 50 seabass already packed and ready to travel to the airport, thanks to the assistance of the small army of helpers David had recruited for the week. The tiny seabass were headed to the University of Southampton, for research purposed, and all I had to do was thank Zé and drive home to the sound of my favourite radio show ‘Prova Oral’ with a bag of small Star Wars Lego figurines that I had picked up from Leonor, my (first) ex-wife, a few minutes before class.
Leonor lived in my house for a few years, while I lived with my second wife. It’s confusing, I know. It is what it is. During that time, Leonor assembled a Lego Millennium Falcon that I bought at a conference in Billund, Legoland’s headquarters, during an EUAC meeting in 2013. The problem is that, when she moved out and remarried, naughty Leonor took Chewbacca, Obi Wan Kenobi, R2-D2, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Han Solo and Princess Leia with her! However, it didn’t take more than a few messages to rustle them back to Nikola, who had grown into a full fledge Star Wars fan. I wonder why??
As soon as I entered the house, I hid the bag with the figurines inside a drawer in the living room. Then I spread clues all over the house, ‘Treasure Hunt’ style, starting with a drawing on the kitchen board, where I usually leave him funny drawings and kisses before each trip. The first drawing led him to the underwear drawer, where another piece of paper would take him to the office, then the shelf in the shower cabin, behind the toilet in the small bathroom, and on and on until he came across the little bag with the much-wanted figurines, which he could finally play with in the Millennium Falcon that Nina dismantled so I could reassemble it with our little Booboo.
It was around eight o’clock when Zé Pedro told me he’d already left the seabass boxes at the airport and was on his way to my place to pick me up, so we could drive to Olhão together. I had a nice vegetarian Whopper (but with cheese) in the Alcochete service area, and we pulled into Olhão at 11 o’clock at night, just after our truck had arrived and 160 Azorean Trachurus picturatus had been acclimated to an extra tank loaded at the last minute. These animals were flown in from the Azores on purpose, since The Force told me that a potential unexpected shortage might be affecting us just before departure.
In the meantime, I congratulated myself on the genius of consolidating five deliveries into a single road trip, a beautiful piece of coordination that isn’t always possible, but which had worked out very well this time. This was quickly followed by the check-in of seven marine biologists at the B & B Olhão hotel in Ria Shopping at half past midnight, and I was out cold, after replying to a few emails, by two a.m.
Friday, 12 April
Breakfast was scheduled for 8 a.m. since we weren’t in too much of a hurry. After all, the ferry from the Canaries wouldn’t dock until 2 p.m. and the lorry still had to be cleared through customs and drive to the aquarium in Seville, where we agreed to meet by 8 p.m. In the meantime, Sérgio Sousa, owner of the transport company TPO, our usual partner, had already told me that the drivers wouldn’t be able to leave until six in the afternoon, because their driving timetable dictated it. Damn. It would have been fabulous to take advantage of the ferry’s earlier arrival, as it was originally scheduled for eight in the evening, but the drivers’ legal timetable had the final word on the subject.
Around nine o’clock Zé and I were pumping water into a transport tank in our small rented van, before heading to our friend Miguel. It wasn’t long before we had the wrasses caught the previous Monday loaded into our tank, as well as some rays caught by Miguel’s fishermen friends. We also stopped off at the University of the Algarve’s Ramalhete facility, where we caught over a hundred fiddler crabs, Uca tangeri, which are the test subject of our client, a researcher at the University College of London, who is doing research into artificial intelligence using the neurons of Algarve crabs. How about that?
At half past noon all the critters were at IPMA, safely tucked away in the shade and with the van’s door ajar to encourage a draft, while the whole team huddled in front of a yummy cuttlefish rice and grilled fish at Vista Formosa, our restaurant choice for pre-transport lunches. Our friends Sérgio and Suzy Sousa, owners of TPO, were by my side, as were drivers Armando and Mário, Valeriy, Marisa, and all our awesome team members, such as the great Ivan, who came all the way from the Azores to participate in his first transport ever, David, Zé Pedro, Reis and our recent additions, Miguel and Inês.
Bellies filled, all we had to do was check that all the equipment was in order, since all animals were loaded onto the truck and the drivers’ timetable didn’t allow them to leave before six. I took advantage of those three hours to send a few more emails, while Zé and his colleagues packed the Uca tangeri into two boxes, properly packed with ice that I had asked from Ana Mendes a few days earlier. This process sounds easy, but it involves some important steps, such as making sure that the animals, which are wrapped like candy in wet cloths, don’t touch the ice directly. This led us to create a kind of ‘wall’ inside the boxes, which maintains a chilled environment, but free from direct contact with the ice, or its impact if it moves.
In the meantime, I asked David to pop into the office where I checked my emails and we went over the packing plan once more, which seemed very satisfactory. This because a comment that David and Reis had made over lunch did not go unnoticed. They both claimed that the Scomber seemed larger than usual, so we changed their estimated weight from 50 to 70 grams, which still had us well inside the 20 kilos per cubic meter safety envelope.
All numbers looked extremely acceptable but, since the TPO boys weren’t quite ready to leave by six, which was a bit annoying, Zé and I had to leave straight away for Seville, where we were going to pick up almost a hundred small imperial blackfish, Schedophilus ovalis, and Bermuda chub, Kyphosus sectatrix, which had arrived from the Canaries along with the sharks and rays. We knew we had to be at Lisbon airport to deliver the fiddler crabs no later than 2 a.m., so the clock was ticking.
Before we left, our hearts were pounding because the tractor on the lorry had to be changed and, for whatever reason, our inverter wasn’t working properly. This equipment converts the lorry’s 24 volts into 220 volts that power our extremely efficient filtration. Without this machine, a transport simply can’t take place, so this last-minute disruption, after three hours of waiting around, raised my irritation level to the point where I had to get in the van with Zé and head for Seville before I exploded.
Before fleeing, however, we still managed to realise that the problem was with the connection of our cables to the truck’s negative pole because, as soon as Zé connected it to the tractor metal bed itself, everything was fine. It was just a matter of finding a screw that was strong enough to hold our cable (very) tightly to the truck’s structure and the inverter seemed to hold.
On the way to Seville, I was able to play my beloved ‘Prova Oral’ on the radio, which had its usual soothing effect. We arrived in the Andalusian capital at half past nine in the evening (an hour later than in Portugal) and came across an aquaculture lorry where one of the twelve rectangular tanks had our hundred tiny Schedophilus and Kyphosus swimming freely. “This isn’t going to be easy…” I thought, just before asking the lorry driver to lower the water level, which was surprisingly clear, even after 36 hours of travelling.
With my knees hurting badly from the very abrasive texture of the fibreglass coating that covered the truck, I took my flip-flops off and wallet and mobile phone out of my shorts before slipping into the rectangular tank, with water up to my knees. I was sorry there wasn’t a photographic record of the moment, because half of Seville was celebrating, singing, and dancing while Zé, Javi and I were pulling fish out of a lorry in the warm Spanish evening.
The process still took about 45 minutes, but we removed all the fish that were going to Peniche and left a bucket with the 10 Schedophilus that David would catch a few minutes later, along with the 4 Rostroraja alba rays, 10 small Squalus acanthias and 2 Mustelus mustelus.
At half past ten Zé and I set off, Waze showing that we would arrive in Lisbon four hours later, which was still 30 minutes before our deadline. However, we knew there would be stops and let’s not forget that ‘my’ Waze is used to driving at 140 and not 110 km per hour, which was the average speed of our van. This basically meant we didn’t have a moment to lose and time was of the essence.
Tradition dictates that, when driving along the Algarve highway at night, dinner consists of ‘napolitanas’, a yummy chocolate treat bought from the Loulé petrol station, along with a pair of Red Bulls and empadas, or meat pies. And this is how you treat two marine biologists to dinner for 9.49 euros. Meanwhile, Waze was adding more and more minutes to its initial estimate, but we still entered the airport’s cargo terminal exactly ten minutes before 2 a.m., much to Nuno Alexandre’s delight, our wonderful Nippon Express freight forwarder.
We began by joking about the originality of our activity, which forced us to put boxes on scales and pallets at two in the morning on a Saturday, when half of Lisbon was out drinking and trying to score companionship for the evening. In the meantime, my heart was pounding because the boxes weighed 37 kilos and not the 25 declared in the previously prepared documentation, but a phone call to Groundforce supervision softened what could have been a bigass problem. “Just another Friday evening at Flying Sharks…” we joked, before saying goodbye and me getting into a taxi home, so that Zé could head straight to Peniche.
It was three in the morning when I jumped in the shower, but I didn’t get to bed until four, with a serious adrenaline bolt rushing through me. That same adrenaline got me up three hours later, at seven, and just as well, because things weren’t going so well in the truck headed to Poland.
Saturday, 13 April
Knowing David, I knew the proverbial shit must be hitting the fan when I read a message he had sent me just a few minutes earlier, close to 7 a.m., indicating that the water in the mackerel tanks was quite turbid and certainly didn’t look as clear as usual. All chemical parameters seemed fine, such as pH, oxygen concentration and ammonia, but it seemed to him that something wasn’t quite right, and he therefore recommended doing a massive water change as soon as possible. Considering they had driven through the night and were near Valladolid, I told him to head for the San Sebastián aquarium, so I spent the next few hours trying to get a hold of the aquarium’s curator, since my friend Amalia Martinez, the boss for decades, had recently retired and I didn’t know who was in charge.
It wasn’t long before half of the nuestros hermanos I bugged that Saturday morning put me in touch with Eneko, a senior aquarist in San Sebastian, who immediately accepted our request for help and provided water to David, who arrived around noon. In the meantime, I also got in touch with Ana from IPMA and asked her if she could weigh some of the mackerel that had been left behind in Olhão. She replied almost immediately that they had weighed some losses, and she too was surprised by the unusually high average weight of the animals: 213 grams.
Shit. Three times higher than the 70 grams David and I had estimated the day before. Of course, when I put that figure into our packing-plan, the result was catastrophically high, at around 50 kilos of biomass per cubic metre, totally unacceptable for mackerel… Or any fish.
I didn’t even send these figures to David, who had enough on his plate, but I prepared a rough drawing with some arrows, recommending moving mackerel from tanks 1 and 4, which had the highest concentration, to 2 and 3, where only small sharks and rays travelled. The idea was to split the load among all tanks and pray that the change of water in San Sebastián would make a difference.
In the meantime, the problem was shared with the rest of the team, who immediately sprang into action and, despite it being a weekend and very early in the morning, recommendations soon came pouring in, and keeping the temperature down was on top of the list. That’s exactly what was done, and it certainly helped to alleviate the mackerel’s situation, although it caused some collateral damage.
It was four in the afternoon when David and the team left San Sebastián and headed for L’Ocearium du Croisic, 677 kilometres away, with the 919 kilometres that separated San Sebastián from Seville, and 187 from Olhão, already under their belts.
Sunday, 14 April
They arrived in Croisic at 1 a.m. on Sunday morning, after being stuck in traffic, on the motorway near Bordeaux, for three hours, due to a nasty car accident. Given the early hour, our client and friend Stéphane Auffret provided a socket that they could plug into, but recommended that they only did water changes in the morning, which we knew would be a problem, but how do you ask a client to take off their pyjamas at 1 a.m. on a Saturday evening and come give us water when, on top of that, I’d already told him that the only Trachurus we had (the 160 that came from the Azores) were going to our Polish customer. That basically meant our friend Stéphane was going to give us water and electricity for… nothing.
On Sunday morning, after the team had a chance to rest for a while in a local hotel, we had 200 dead mackerel. If I’m going to be brutally honest, I didn’t mourn them deeply, because clearly more than the 900 we needed were loaded in Olhão, so a little loss of biomass only improved the situation for the rest.
But that wasn’t the only bad news, because Stéphane’s only available water had a salinity of 12 parts per thousand, or 12 grams per litre, which is horrendously lower than our 35 ppt, the normal salinity of seawater. In view of this, there wasn’t much David could do apart from a (very) small water change, and head for our next client, Nausicaá, who had ordered 100 Azorean derbio, Trachinotus ovatus.
It was only 650 kilometres to Boulogne-sur-mer, where Dominique and Florent were waiting for David, and I was buying a ‘Bandida do Pomar’ cyder at the Café da Mata, in a park where Nina, Nikola and I were in Lisbon, when a whatsapp came in that froze my blood – again.
Nina had arranged a play date between Nikola and the son of a nice couple she’d met a few months earlier. I would have loved to take full advantage of those moments to relax a little, but around noon David messaged that the temperature of our Audi – with 830.000 kilometres and an overhaul done on purpose a few days before the trip – was 130 degrees.
“WTF?? These guys are going to blow the engine!!!” I thought, about to call David, when a message saying “Audi’s cooling fluid tank just blew. But we’re working on it.” came on at 11:49 a.m. “At least it wasn’t the engine,” I thought to myself…
This was followed by the traditional hours of waiting for a tow truck and roadside assistance, which, exactly like what happened in Germany on the 17th of March, wasn’t great either. One could say that having your car breaking down on a Sunday is never a good idea, so please avoid it and always try to have car troubles from Monday to Friday, between 9 and 6, ok? You’re very welcome for this life-saving advice.
Meanwhile, David had set in place the obvious plan, which was to send Inês and Miguel to follow the truck, which was heading for Nausicaá and hadn’t even noticed the problem, while Reis hopped on an Uber and rented a Peugeot from Sixt in Nantes, 30 minutes away. Meanwhile, I was trying to politely strike up a conversation with the father of Nikola’s friend, the friendly Ricardo, who was telling me all about how he was used to eating excellent quality fish in his hometown of Salvador, in Brazil. “We eat a lot of Pirarucu on the grill. It’s so yummy!” he’d say, while I admit my mind was only on the broken-down Audi and a lorry full of fish, with two young and inexperienced students following them.
In the middle of all this, and already at home, faced with the incompetence of OkTeleseguro’s roadside assistance, with whom I exchanged angry and bitter words, the three boys left the Audi in front of a garage somewhere in Le-Temple-de-Bretagne, in the middle of nowhere. I sent David the text in French that was supposed to be written on a note left next to the car key, placed in the letterbox after they’d made sure that the garage had recent comments on the web and wasn’t closed for business.
At nine in the evening Inês and Miguel arrived to Nausicaá behind the lorry loaded with mackerel, sharks, rays, and many other things, with David, Reis and Ivan trailing a couple of hours behind in the rental Peugeot.
It wasn’t long before I received a private message from Dominique, the customer of the 100 Trachinotus, complaining that at least half had succumbed to the low temperature in the lorry, a step taken to save the mackerel. “Fuck,” I thought, “we’re going to have to make another trip to L’Ocearium du Croisic and also to Nausicaá to make up for these losses”.
On the plus side, this would be on the way to the replacement trip to Poland that I already knew would be necessary.
Two hours later David, Ivan and Reis also arrived in Nausicaá, while new water was already being exchanged from all the tanks with the wonderfully cool ten degrees provided by our local friends, who enjoyed a lovely Sunday evening baby-sitting the Flying Sharks crew. Before they all went to rest from the day’s adventures, I still chatted to David who, surprisingly, reported only 20 losses of mackerel and a substantial improvement in the water quality from tank 1, which had the most fish of all. “Not bad, not bad at all!” I thought to myself, before setting the alarm for six in the morning, the time my friend Filipe Pereira would meet me so we’d fly to Vienna, where the boys were due to arrive early on Tuesday morning.
The original plan was to head from Nausicaá to Sea Life Speyer, then Haus des Meeres in Vienna, Tropicarium in Budapest, and finish our tour at the Gdynia Aquarium in Poland.
But that plan was to change significantly. For the better.
Monday, 15 April
I woke up at 5:58 a.m., two minutes before the alarm clock shook me back to reality. I even took a quick nap on the sofa in the living room after changing it to 6:45. I had a quick shower before going downstairs to meet Filipe, who arrived promptly at 7:15, as usual. Before that, however, I was of course struck by another nervous spell in the bathroom, while I was asking Dominique to give the boys some oxygen, which seemed to be the new crisis that morning.
After good new water in the tanks, the lack of oxygen was the big badass bogeyman of the moment and Dominique told me via whatsapp that he’d been to the oxygen shop on his way to the aquarium and that renting oxygen was a relatively easy process, although it would require a 3-to-5-year contract. I accepted straight away, and we agreed that João Reis would go there, with my Revolut card in hand. Hell, at that point I’d agree to a 50 year long contract, because we were halfway to Poland and the fish wouldn’t get there without oxygen.
I topped up the Revolut card with another 5.000 euros, leaving it with 10.000 euros, on the way to the airport in an Uber, after leaving Filipe’s car in my parents’ garage. I gave Reis the green light to spend as much as he needed, while David was already driving to Lille, from where he would fly home at 11:45 a.m., while Zé Pedro, who had landed in Lille the night before, was joining the group.
I was already at Lisbon airport, after the nervous intensity of installing the Ryanair app just before bag-drop, that I read an email from Arndt, from Sea Life Speyer, the next stop for the guys and some 550 kilometres away. Our Germanic friend was surprised by our visit that day, because my previous messages sadly ended up in his spam folder. Despite his surprise, he confirmed that he would leave a 220 volt socket outside, even though he left work at 4 p.m. I thanked him while trying to enjoy a McDonald’s ham & cheese toastie with a cappuccino at a very busy Terminal 2 and before rushing to the loo again. I called him on the street, from the unpleasant corral where they put us before walking to low-cost aircraft. I swear to God, sometimes it just feels like airports go out of their way to make the experience of flying a low-cost airline, such as our choice that day, as unpleasant as possible. Anyway, that’s when I begged Arndt for a change of water when the lorry arrived, around 8 p.m., and I had already offered to pay the extra time to the water-person who stayed, but no luck.
Once inside the plane, the oxygen situation seemed to have been resolved for 3.000 euros, but David sent me an audio that sent shivers down my spine – again. The guy in the oxygen shop called Dominique from Nausicaá just before signing the contract. He confirmed that the contract had the ‘blessing’ of the Nausicaá aquarium, and everything was ready to go, until the Master of Oxygen asked if the bottles were leaving the country and Dominique replied affirmatively. Oops.
The contract was, of course, immediately refused and, despite João Reis’s heroic insistence at the counter, the guy refused to continue the conversation because he didn’t want to lose his job over the matter. He asked Reis to leave and that was that. So there it was: we were running close to empty on oxygen halfway through the journey.
In the meantime, Dominique sent me a brief message to say that he was in a meeting and, unfortunately, he couldn’t do anything because the oxygen tanks were fitted with geo-locator, which I immediately thought was a load of bollocks from Mr. Oxygen Guy. The last messages I sent, with the plane already rolling for take-off, shared phone numbers of Arndt from Speyer, Daniel from Vienna, and Philippe Jouk from Antwerp. The plan was for the boys to secure oxygen from any of these three spots. Meanwhile, the lorry could borrow a single oxygen bottle from Dominique and march on to Speyer, our next destination, while trying to secure more oxygen enroute.
With our Ryanair wheels already up in the air, I chatted to Filipe, aching inside from not knowing whether, when we landed in Vienna three hours later, we’d have the truck rolling to Speyer with oxygen secured, or whether it would still be in Boulogne-sur-mer trying to find the said life-saving gas.
As soon as we the wheels set down in Vienna and I switched my phone back on, I had a message from David and another from Rui Guedes, both asking me to call them urgently. I rang David first, who shared an audacious plan with me!
“How about…” he said “…if we go straight to Poland, which is the most important client and has the aquarium opening on the 19th?”. I did some quick geographical and calendar math in my head and immediately replied, “Of course! I’m getting on a train to Berlin straight away!”
As I looked at the map, sitting in a corner of Vienna airport with my laptop, I saw that Sea Life Oberhausen was only 432 kilometres from Boulogne-sur-mer, followed by Berlin 527 km after and then Gdynia after 600 km! “Fuck! We’ll be in Gdynia tomorrow night!!!” I thought, asking Filipe to check trains to Berlin while I fired off calls to both Oberhausen and Berlin.
It wasn’t long before we realised that the train to Berlin would take 8 hours and cost a hundred and something euros per head, so I dropped 399 euros at the travel assistance desk and bought us two Eurowings tickets for 4 hours later, immediately cancelling – with the appropriate penalty – the hotel I had booked in Vienna. This was followed by explanations to Daniel Abed-Navandi, our dear Austrian customer who had already booked a place where we were supposed to enjoy a wonderful Wiener Schnitzel dinner.
Meanwhile, with two salami pizzas and two ice-cold Coke Zeros in front of us, as well as the laptop connected to the Vienna airport’s wifi, I secured oxygen and an electrical socket in Oberhausen, more oxygen at Berlin’s Sea Life Centre, even more oxygen, an electrical socket, and lots of water at Berlin’s ZooAquarium. Along the way was also Hannover’s Sea Life, which only had a two-litre oxygen bottle, essential for assisting divers in the event of an accident, and therefore could be of no assistance. But three out of four wasn’t bad at all! “This shit is coming together, Filipinho!” I said with moderate enthusiasm for the first time since Friday.
We landed in Berlin at half past nine in the evening and, after a 67 euros Uber ride and dropping our bags off at Hotel Zoe, conveniently located within walking distance from Berlin Sea Life Centre, we stuffed our bellies with a delightful kebab – which is called a “kebap” in Berlin.
In the meantime, Zé Pedro was with Ivan and Reis collecting oxygen from Oberhausen and were expected to arrive at the Berlin ZooAquarium by 6 a.m., which was the time I set my alarm clock to.
Tuesday, 16 April
I slept pretty horribly that night, as in previous weeks, and even had a bizarre dream where I was promoting the University of the Algarve, but nobody paid any attention to me… Anyway, all Freudian interpretations aside, I woke up to my alarm clock, which actually went off at a quarter past six in the morning and I immediately came across a message from Zé Pedro, also from 6:15 a.m., saying “We just arrived at the ZooAquarium”!
Wow! It wasn’t long before Zé confirmed that he was already with curator Marko and I was on my way to the city’s Sea Life Centre, a brisk 5-minute walk away, as I had planned it the previous afternoon when I booked the Berlin hotel at Vienna airport. Borrowing an oxygen cylinder, which Filipe carried on his shoulder, we waited for an Uber to take us to the Zoo, where we met up with the guys at half past seven.
Of course, the big drama that morning was renting – or buying – more oxygen, and Marko’s fabulous assistant threw herself at the Bartel Berlin phone number, while I answered (in English) to the questions that someone asked her on the other end of the line (in German). The guys at Bartel could easily sell oxygen, but…
…we had to arrange proper and legal transport, and the little French Peugeot we’d rented wouldn’t do the job. In the meantime, all the Berlin Zoo vans were out on the street, so I nervously asked where the toilets were. This short break was a lifesaver because, upon my return one of the vans was already on its way back to the Zoo and, in less than half an hour, I was in it, on my way to Bartel, where a beautiful B50, with 50 litres of oxygen at 200 bars, was already waiting for us. When I pulled out my credit card, I asked the nice man in the shop for an adapter for the oxygen regulator lent to me by the Sea Life Centre, whose curator, the friendly Martin Hansel, had been our dinner guest only a month before, when he came on holiday to Portugal with his wife.
Given the ease of the process, I asked Mr. Bartel for “Zwei flaschen”, which is German for two bottles, then loaded into the zoo van for the modest sum of 1.200 euros. Not bad!
It wasn’t even noon when we finally returned to the Zoe Hotel for three hours of sleep, which was as long as I could extend our late check-out to, for 35 euros per room. Zé and Ivan were able to shower and rest, while Reis was already flying back to Lisbon, on a flight I bought less than 24 hours earlier.
At three o’clock we were swallowing Big Macs in front of the zoo, just before a final water change, oxygen, and chemical adjustment, with all the tanks showing considerably more stabilised water quality, not to mention extra oxygen from Oberhausen, Berlin and the two huge B50 cylinders acquired just hour before. Our truck driver friends were allowed to start an hour later, and everything pointed to us arriving in Gdynia, the destination of the overwhelming majority of the animals in the lorry, by 1 a.m. Not bad.
Wednesday, 17 April
Turns out that it wasn’t 1 a.m., but 2 a.m., when the beautiful TPO truck parked in front of the Gdynia Aquarium, and we started acclimating the animals to the aquarium water. The parameters were identical, except for a three-degree difference in temperature, with us at 13 and the aquarium at 16.
After about 30 minutes, I put my rubber waders on, immediately feeling my right foot getting wet, which annoyed the f#ck out of me because, in an operation costing a quarter of a million euros, one would hope that there would be enough money to buy rubber waders without any holes, and the hole in my right leg was already familiar from previous transports. Anyway.
After a humiliating conversation with Marcin, the curator, and the aquarium’s director, I admitted that the transport had not been up to the Flying Sharks standard that we had accustomed our clients to. I also explained that the unexpected larger size of the mackerel had resulted in tremendous oxygen consumption and some losses. Looking at the mackerel, Marcin and his boss immediately said that they would be too big for their tank, so they preferred to take only 250 of the 500 ordered.
That news wasn’t so bad, because it meant that we would have enough mackerel for Budapest and Vienna, although it meant that he would have to return to Gdynia to replace the missing animals, but that scenario had already become clear days before.
The sun was already peeking out when we finally delivered all the rays, smooth-hounds, dogfish, mackerel (they ended up with 300), small skates and other fish. In the meantime, I still had a little irritation with the aquarium team, who were in a daze with the sharks swimming in the big tank, while Zé and I unloaded the rest of the truck by ourselves, but we managed to nudge the troops and get them all moving again.
The most painful moment came at about six o’clock, when I had to get out of the truck, in short sleeves, to put on a sweatshirt and jacket, under freezing two or three degrees and searing wind.
It was 7:12 a.m. when I climbed into bed at the Gdynia Boutique Hotel, after checking in myself, Filipe, Zé and Ivan, with a second trip to the aquarium, a 10-minute walk away, to pick up drivers Armando and Mário, who fully deserved a shower and a few hours of sleep in a proper bed. We had agreed to set off at 11 a.m., so I set my alarm for 10:45, which gave me a whole 3 hours and 23 minutes of rest. Not so bad.
I woke up at 9:17 a.m. and replied to messages on my phone, shortly followed by Filipe, and we quickly went downstairs to enjoy a hearty Polish hotel breakfast, which would stop at 10. However, our plan didn’t quite work the way we wished because breakfast should have been pre-ordered the night before. After the initial frustration passed, we entered the first door on the left of the hotel, the Kofeina café, which was wonderfully pleasant and had an indie vibe that I enjoyed immediately. Two freshly squeezed orange juices, a pair of wonderful sandwiches with bacon, cheese and tomato, a mug of very strong coffee and, by 11 a.m., we were all down in the hotel lobby, ready to go, as planned. Well, yours truly was a little late, because a quick nervous trip to the bathroom got in the way of punctuality.
I drove my guys first and then picked up Armando and Mário. In the meantime, I asked Filipe to collect all losses in black garbage bags, which, surprisingly, weren’t nearly as many as we’d feared. I’d say no more than 100, so probably a total of 300 to 400 lost Scomber in total. By noon we were ready to cover the 1111 kilometres that separated us from Budapest, where we hoped to arrive by 3 a.m. This process, however, suffered a mild delay because someone had locked the pylon restricting access to the aquarium’s technical area. It had been free until then, but some zealous employee had locked it with us still inside, so I had to go in search of the security guard who could let us all out.
The first half hour of the journey went well, but we were then hit by a heavy traffic jam, which made us fear for the success of our operation because, on this last leg, Armando and Mário were only allowed to drive for 21 hours, which meant that, come rain or shine, we had to be in Vienna by 9 a.m. on Thursday since, after that time, the drivers were legally obligated to pull over and rest.
The plan was therefore to arrive in Budapest at 4 a.m., drive off at 5 a.m. and arrive in Vienna, 270 kilometres away, by 8 a.m. We had an hour to spare, and it’s well known that these journeys don’t really have a lot of respect for pre-defined schedules. Regardless, we were eating up Polish kilometres one after the other and keeping up a good pace.
Between quick stops to change drivers, buying Red Bull and cashews, the basis of my diet during these operations, and the necessary water quality monitoring, the journey continued without incident, with lots of oxygen and very few fish in the tanks, which allowed us to finally breathe a sigh of relief because water quality was back to the magnificent clarity we’re used to. What with all the fish we had left behind in Gdynia (some alive, others in bags), of course the very light load all the way to Budapest and Vienna allowed our filtration to work its magic without difficulty.
Everything was going smoothly until we lost sight of the lorry after a stop to check water quality and buy some nice warm kilbasa hot-dogs. The problem was that when Armando shared his position on whatsapp, we saw that Mário, then at the wheel, had left the motorway that ran through the country from north to south. Irritated by the twists and turns we were taking to catch up with the lorry, which was driving along back roads and through small towns, we only caught up with it when they finally stopped at a machine on the border with the Czech Republic, to buy a vignette that allowed them to drive on the motorways.
Thursday, 18 April
After helping Armando buy the vignette for the lorry, I bought one for the Peugeot, but we had to stop less than an hour later to repeat the process at the border with Slovakia. Buying the second vignette was more complex, because the machine asked for the ‘Obu’ code, and I had no idea what that was. But Armando saw an open office, a bizarre and unexpected treat at 1 a.m., where a very bulky lady was speaking in an aggressive Slovakian tone next to a Slovakian Betty White with an even worse temper.
The pair asked us, with very bad manners, “Czech Republic or “Slovakia?!?” and I replied “Budapest”, so they pointed me towards the bulky lady’s window, which put Betty White at ease.
The process of acquiring the machine – the “Obu” we were asked about before – was easy enough. The worst part was when the lady asked “Invoice?” and I stupidly nodded yes. Fifteen minutes followed, while TPO and lorry documents had to be presented and I cursed the moment I’d had the bright idea to ask for an invoice. Some twenty minutes later, the invoice finally came through, with countless attachments, and Armando and I agreed that the truck should get on its way, while I dealt with the Peugeot vignette.
We said goodbye and, as soon as I put my Peugeot documents on the table, the lady looked at me angrily and asked “No truck?” to which I replied “No. Small car” pointing to the drawing in the Sixt envelope. She angrily replied “Internet!” and gave me a piece of paper with a website, which I accessed from inside the Peugeot and paid the appropriate fee of 12 euros, so that we wouldn’t be driving illegally on the 50 or 60 kilometres of Slovakian highway.
In the meantime, I was keeping Istvan Deres, from the Tropicarium aquarium in Budapest, up to date with our progress, and we got there at 4 a.m. The 250 agreed mackerel (50 more than the original plan), a very large stingray, Dasyatis pastinaca, and 8 gilthead seabreams, Sparus aurata, were unloaded in less than half an hour, but this time I got into the rubber waders barefoot, so as not to wet any more socks. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
By 5 a.m. I was again behind the wheel of the Peugeot as we headed for Haus des Meeres in Vienna, with the GPS saying we’d be there by 7:30 a.m., 90 minutes ahead of time!! I sped along the motorway until we tucked ourselves behind the truck and it must have been 8 in the morning when I asked Filipe to change seats, because it was time to buy our tickets home, finally!
By then my confidence in our arrival time was pretty high, so I was still looking for the TAP flight that left Vienna at half past two in the afternoon. It was all down to Filipe’s good judgement, who recommend the Vueling 16:00 flight, and I’m glad I bought those tickets instead, because it allowed us to enjoy a delightful lunch with Daniel after we delivered the rest of the mackerel, 333 instead of the 200 ordered. We also delivered (almost) all the small critters that Daniel had ordered and, all things considered, despite the headaches during the first few days of transport, we closed this bad boy with a golden key and high morale amongst the troops.
So, let’s do a bit of math: 333 Scomber safely delivered to Vienna, 250 to Budapest, 300 to Gdynia and an estimated 417 losses (to make things easy on the brain), meant we had originally loaded 1300 fish in Olhão, plus the 160 Trachurus, which sadly didn’t make it to Gdynia, most likely due to the extreme low temperatures we subjected them to. That basically means it wasn’t just the size of the fish that we loaded; it was also the number… “A hard lesson learned” I told myself while these grim embarrassing thoughts and numbers swirled around my troubled head.
All this, of course, after helping Armando and Mário back down the truck on a busy street in Vienna, because our driver friends had gone to the wrong side of the aquarium. But everything worked out in the end, as always.
In the meantime, André, our TechAquarium buddy, and Tomás, a former student who helped us occasionally, joined us, having flown to Vienna the day before on tickets I’d bought a few hours earlier. André and Tomás were going to return the Peugeot to Nantes, while also picking up the Audi which, according to the workshop where it was left, should be ready the following day, Friday.
Despite our separate seats on the two flights from Vienna to Barcelona and Barcelona to Lisbon, I still ordered us four gin and tonics, because we deserved a treat, however small, for the stoicism shown during the previous days. As a final recap, it all came down to the number and size of the mackerel, which were larger than anticipated and we simply didn’t realise that in Olhão, while loading them. I’m the first to admit that, looking at the fish, there’s no way in hell I’d give them ‘213 grams’, which was their effective true weight, against the 70 we had estimated.
However, in the face of such adversity, a cool head, good reasoning, placing the absolute priority on animal welfare and a very powerful list of contacts generated over three decades, as well as exceptionally powerful filtration systems and dosing of chemicals, actually managed to get us through the end. Sort of.
It was about nine in the evening when I said goodbye to Filipe and went home, after also waving goodbye to both Ivan and Zé at the airport. Nikola was looking forward to the Legos I’d told him I’d bought at Vienna airport and all I could think about was the wonderful weekend ahead, with the Polish transport already on my back. Still, my darling wife decided to warn me that she wanted to have “a talk” about how my anxiety levels the weeks leading up to the transport, and how they had had a dire effect on our family life, something she chose to share with me minutes before flying home for a well-deserved rest, bless her soul.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the great Filipe Pereira for the magnificent photos of this operation and thank all those amazing individuals from Croisic, Boulogne, Speyer, Oberhausen, Berlin, Gdynia, Budapest, and Vienna who basically bent over backwards to assist us in a dire hour of need! We love you all and we absolutely promise to do better next time. That means counting the fish we load more accurately and weighing a decent sized sample too! Amongst a few other details.
Scout’s honor!
