🚢 Seas of Connectivity

As we recently celebrated International Fishermen’s Day in June, I want to highlight ongoing efforts to enable the crew on fishing vessels to stay in touch with family and friends and access support if they have questions about their employment. The things we take for granted living and working on land are not yet the norm for all those working at sea – and they may be at sea for days, weeks or months.

Implementing Wi-Fi onboard isn’t as straightforward as flipping a switch. It involves finding the right provider, keeping up with rapidly changing technology, negotiating contracts, determining when it is safe to have Wi-Fi, managing provision of data, budgeting – there’s a lot to work out.

GSA aimed to establish best practices by looking at current practices and consulting technical experts. Our efforts resulted in a report released in April. We learned that:

• Connectivity is key to crew wellbeing. Further, it can enhance and enable better communications between crew and employers and improve vessel operations.
• Vessel owners need support to navigate this fast-changing technology to better understand how to provide crew with safe, appropriate access and how they might work together to pool contracts and services for mutual benefit.

Travis Heneveld from GEEKS WITHOUT FRONTIERS , one of our partners in this work, and I had the pleasure of discussing these initiatives on the latest episode of the Aquademia podcast. I hope you enjoy it, maybe learn something, and most importantly want to get involved. Thank you for sharing it!

What we were up to in July...

🐟 BAP Spotlight Story: The Kingfish Company | This Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) spotlight story features The Kingfish Company , a Dutch Yellowtail producer and the world's first BAP-certified land-based farm.

🧭 Seafood Summit 2024: Planning Your Trip | Joining us in Scotland for the Responsible Seafood Summit? There are many elements to planning your trip, and we're here to help.

👋 Media to Marine Science: An Aquaculture Journey | We last interviewed Bonnie Waycott , a GSA Individual Member, back in 2019. With so much happening over the past five years, we decided to catch up!

🍛 BAP X FoodByMaria: Air Fryer Salmon Bowls | Maria Koutsogiannis created this delicious air fryer salmon bowl using BAP-certified Skuna Bay salmon. Try her recipe for yourself, and tell us what you think!

📰 Advocate Online Publication: Using AI to streamline gender-sorting processes in salmon aquaculture | Artificial intelligence promises to automate gender-sorting of salmon, yielding enhanced fish quality assessment and production

🎧 Aquademia Podcast: Wi-Fi on Fishing Vessels with GSA & GWF | Melanie Siggs from GSA and Travis Heneveld from GEEKS WITHOUT FRONTIERS joined to talk about their vessel Wi-Fi connectivity project.