Warriorbern on the Move

After a wonderful evening and night spent with my friends, Jo and Diets, in Johannesburg, I boarded an Air Seychelles Airbus A330-200 to fly from Johannesburg to Mahé Island in the Seychelles. I was so relieved to find that Air Seychelles have replaced their ancient Boeing 767-200s with these new Airbuses. The five hour flight was not bad at all and we had quite a smooth landing which makes a change from the way we used to slam into the runway before. I had asked for a window seat on this flight and the only one available was situated at the rear of the plane which meant I was last off the plane and last in the queue to go through immigration. I am carrying a food supplement with me to make up for my rather poor diet on this trip and I debated long and hard with myself about whether to declare it on entry into Seychelles. Eventually I decided that I should mark on the Customs form that I have a plant derivative in my bag and then see what happened. Well, nothing happened! Th...

My stay in Tana has come to an end. It has been a very productive time but also somewhat boring with no outside excursions. The workshop finished up on Thursday afternoon with some very intense discussions around the information that has been entered for Madagascar. It really is fantastic to see people so passionate about getting things correct. They are very enthusiastic about WIOFish and even asked if it was not possible to have these workshops twice a year! Even I think that I could not manage doing this whole roadshow twice a year and I suspect there would be mutiny at home LOL. Yesterday I had the first of my "normal" work days on this trip. Due to financial reasons the workshops were all made one day shorter than previously but because of flight availability and an unwillingness (quite rightly) to work on weekends, I have these spare days that I have to use for work too. So I spent the day doing the analyses on the freshly entered Malagasy data. It is really amazi...

I have embarked on my annual tour of the countries of the western Indian Ocean to update the fisheries information stored in the WIOFish database which I manage. First stop this year is Antananarivo (Tana), Madagascar. While I work with some great people here, this is my least favourite stop since it is the only workshop that is held nowhere near the sea. If feels quite ridiculous to be discussing marine fisheries when we are approximately 145 km away from the ocean. The financial constraints of the project dictate that the workshop should be held here though because this is where the fisheries ministry, and hence the people required for the workshop, is based. My trip here from Durban was fairly uneventful thank goodness. There was a half-hour delay leaving Johannesburg as Airlink had to swap planes as there was a problem with the one originally selected for the flight. Some of us had already gone through the boarding process and were sitting on the bus waitin...