AN Islander is preparing for life on some of the world’s most remote islands.
Peter Malorey hopes to start a PhD in marine fisheries management this year with the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.
The 26-year-old’s project includes setting up a fisheries monitoring system on the remote atoll of Ono-i-Lau, a group of six islands around 220 miles from Fiji’s central island of Viti Levu, which are the furthest inhabited islands of the Fijian archipelago.
It is a place where the visitor ferry only arrives once a month.
Mr Malorey told the JEP he has been into fishing since a young age, but it was a scuba diving experience while on a holiday to the Bahamas that made him realise he “really liked fish” and wanted to be a marine biologist.
“I fished when I was a kid with my dad, but you would not class that as professional because we were useless!
“Then I went on a holiday to the Bahamas, and I tried scuba diving and thought ‘this is me now’.”
Mr Malorey has a degree in marine biology and coastal ecology as well as a masters in marine sciences under his belt, both from Plymouth University, and is ready to embark on his next project.
Once in the atoll, he plans to use a combination of genetic analysis, citizen science, mathematical modelling, and scuba diving surveys with the aim of improving and promoting sustainable fisheries for the few hundred people of Ono-i-Lau who rely on fish as their main source of food.
On his reason for picking the atoll, Mr Malorey said he found the community after a visit to the village with a friend who grew up there. The warm climate was also another factor which appealed to Mr Malorey, who confessed that he “doesn’t like the cold”.
Getting to this stage was no easy task, he explained. Mr Malorey is still looking for funding to get him out there, together with trying to kit out a research boat over 10,000 miles away, which has proved a “logistical nightmare”.
Mr Malorey has also undertaken numerous medical and sea safety exercises with the Jersey Lifeboat Association to prepare himself to solo skipper his research vessel over hundreds of miles.
However, it is helping and educating the people of the atoll that is driving Mr Malorey. “A key part of the project is local involvement, as these sorts of projects are only ever successful if you include everyone, so I will be including the local people as much as I can.”
“I’m excited to start the work with the people there. In the main island of Fiji, they’re generally very lovely [people], but in the remoter islands, they’re even more friendly.
“When I was staying there, by the end of it, every single person knew my name, and quite a few of them are looking forward to the project.”
Education and gender roles are other factors that have been “difficult” to get to grips with, he said. “Men and women have very set roles there. So, I wasn’t allowed to wash my clothes, I tried to wash them once, but one woman had a proper go at me, and the men don’t really cook.”
A keen chef, Mr Malorey said the men were “surprised” that he could even cook.
“They were so surprised that I could make food, the only time I actually got to cook was on BBQs on the beach [after fishing] because only men were there.”
Mr Malorey said: “The level of education there obviously is not great, and so even though some of them have been fishing for many years, a lot of them don’t know quite basic things about the sea.
“But when we started to have conversations about it [the project], they were so excited to learn.”
Mr Malorey plans to stay in the archipelago once he has finished his PhD, and hopes his project will help shape the future of the remote fisheries. “If I’m able to stay there longer, then the benefits of the project will mean that it will start securing the future for the people because they do fully depend on fish.
“Four years is pretty short for a fisheries project as you need longer-term monitoring, and so if they don’t have someone there helping them out, it may start to falter back.
“Fisheries reporting can be quite annoying, especially for the fishermen because it’s a lot of extra work.
“When they come in from a day or night’s fishing, they’re absolutely exhausted and the last thing they want to do is count through all their fish, which is essentially what it [the project] is.”
Mr Malorey hopes to begin work on the atoll this summer.
