In 1960, trawling was first introduced by the German Government and soon became a rapidly growing fishing method in the Gulf of Thailand.
At the same time Wicharn Sirichai-Ekawat's parents were operating a pen-style fish trap in the estuary of Thailand's Tha-Chine River at Mahachai, southwest of Bangkok. When the trawlers began to encroach on the area of their trap and reduce the catches, they decided that they had no choice but to join the trend.
In 1962, they added a trawl to the little ten-metre boat that they had used to tend their traps. From that humble beginning, the family company has grown to one of the largest fishing companies in Thailand.
Today, the Sirichai Fisheries Group is made up of about ten separate companies. Managing Director Wicharn Sirichai-Ekawat was born in 1952. "The same year that my parents started the fish trap," he smiles in his warm and engaging manner. "I brought the family luck."
The second oldest of nine children, all of whom are involved in the family firm, Khun Wicharn talks with the energy and enthusiasm for the fishing industry of a much younger man. His long days are filled not only with the very hands-on operation of the family fishing company but also in his role as a Thai Senator, Chairman of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Cooperatives and a founding member of the Thai Overseas Fisheries Association among other positions.
As with most fishermen throughout the world, Khun Wicharn is not enamoured of Thai fisheries management.
"They get people from the mountains to look after marine fisheries," he lamented.
The family boats had started fishing foreign grounds in 1968 when national waters were only protected up to the 19km limit.
"First we went off Cambodia, then we fished off Vietnam and Malaysia. Around 1977 the family company started fishing the Andaman Sea side off the west coast of Thailand and off shore from India and Bangladesh," recalled Khun Wicharn.
"At the same time they stopped fishing off Vietnam and Malaysia, both of which had declared a 200-mile [321km] economic zone. With the end of the Vietnam War, that country had started arresting foreign fishing boats."
Today his interest in Thai fisheries is primarily in the benefit of the fish resources and fishermen. The company moved out to the Gulf of Thailand over 42 years ago. In 1974, the company started to use refrigeration for preserving their catches on their 37-metre wooden boats. In 1985, some Thai companies built their first steel boats to a traditional Thai design. By 1998, Khun Wicharn's brother Wiriya, had traveled to trade shows like Danfish and Norfishing to research design trends in Europe. He brought those back with him and had Mahachai Shipyard and PSP Marine build some vessels in the European style.
The first boats were in the 50-metre range with just over 1,340kW. These were serious boats requiring serious financing.
"About that time, the company moved out of the Gulf of Thailand entirely," he recalled, "We needed bigger boats to support the long distance fishing grounds."
Like other emerging Thai fishing companies, Khun Wicharn went in search of productive waters with national governments anxious to capitalise on their new 320km economic zones.
Early adventures
The search for fishing grounds has taken Khun Wicharn into his share of adventures. Like the time that he spent three days in Libya in 1985.
"It looked very promising," he recounted. "At the time the average price for fish in Thailand was about US$0.70 per kilo but in Libya it was US$3 per kilo while diesel fuel for the boats, which cost US$.25 per litre in Thailand, could be had for only US$0.03 per litre in Libya."
All was well until he tried to check in for his flight home only to find that this visa, written entirely in Arabic, was for one year and he was expected to stay the full year. Similarly his boats could fish and sell their catch in Libya but the funds would not be allowed to leave the country. He negotiated his own departure and chalked that one up to experience.
Other countries have been much more welcoming of Khun Wicharn and his fishing boats. He currently has six trawlers in Yemen and is planning to send more. They are fishing cuttlefish there and getting a healthy US$3.00 per kilo.
On a good day – and Khun Wicharn stresses that not all days are good – a boat can take up to 20 tonnes of cuttlefish.
A problem is that there is a closed period for conservation reasons from January to June.
"They aren't really equipped for tuna but in the off time for cuttlefish we have tried some of them fishing tuna with hand lines," he said.
Rather than fish tuna, most of the boats move from the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea to fish shrimp. Always willing to prospect new fisheries, the company has a boat in Oman that is bottom trap fishing for snapper and grouper. Another two mid-water trawlers are working Iranian waters with two more scheduled to go. These boats are paying local taxes and making a profit for the joint venture companies, but it isn't always easy.
"In 1990, we bought ten boats from Japan. Five were tuna longliners and we converted them to trawlers," Khun Wicharn explained. "And there was a tanker, two carrier boats, a patrol boat and a surimi factory boat."
They fished Indonesian waters and they caught fish but the processor had to make 400 tonnes of fresh water per day for the surimi production. It had the capability but the water making drove the cost up to a point that it was not possible to make a profit. Finally they discontinued the experiment.
"It was an expensive learning experience," Khun Wicharn laughed.
The two organised areas of Somalia, Somaliland and Puntland, are also favored locations for Khun Wicharn's operations.
"There is no danger there," he explained. "On one street we visited in Bossaso of Puntland there were many money changers, each with a box full of local and foreign currency, but there was no security and no one stole. There is no need for security because everyone knows everyone and they will recognise a thief!"
In spite of that he admits to travelling with armed guards when in the country himself.
Indignation with India
While Khun Wicharn delights in telling of his adventures making fishing arrangements in various countries, he is angry about the treatment his boats have received in others. India comes in for a good bit of scorn for attempting to arrest one of his carrier vessels for fishing in Indian waters. But this was not a fishing vessel, simply a transport vessel, a reefer ship, with fish aboard.
Khun Wicharn said of the incident in 2001: "Our vessel, 'Al Kawser', was in transit from Yemen to Thailand. It was a carrier ship not a fishing boat. They were passing between the Indian island of Minicoy and the Maldives when the Indian Coast Guard stopped our vessel. They asked for a US$80,000 bribe but we refused to pay."
The passage between the two islands in the Indian Ocean is 48km wide and the island of Minicoy is about 290km off the coast of India.
"When we wouldn't pay the bribe, they claimed that we were fishing in Indian waters but the only nets onboard were two cargo nets," said Khun Wicharn.
The vessel was arrested and Khun Wicharn began to learn about the Indian court system. They lost in the first court hearing and went to the Appeals Court and finally to the Supreme Court. The higher court rejected the guilty conviction of the lower court but rather that throwing the case out, the Supreme Court sent it back to for retrial in the lower courts.
Six months into the court maze Sirichai Fisheries arranged a US$2 million bank guarantee for the vessel to be released. As of March 2010, nine years after the original charge, they have worked their way back up the appeal court level and there is no end in sight, but Wicharn is not quitting in spite of the spiraling costs.
The case of the 'Ekawat Nava 5'
But the most outrageous act by the Indian Navy was the deliberate sinking of one of Khun Wicharn's trawlers in November 2009 in the Gulf of Aden. The 'Ekawat Nava 5' was traveling from Oman to Yemen when pirates hijacked it about 50km off the Yemeni coast. It was early morning when the captain reported to his shore office that the boat was being taken by Somali pirates and the office reported to the International Maritime Bureau piracy centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which, in turn, notified the coalition forces patrolling the region and other military agencies in the area, and distributed photos of the hostage vessel to assure safe passage.
Khun Wicharn and his staff had been following the progress of the vessel with their tracking system. The vessel's transmitter had continued to function after the hijacking. They had also given the code to their system to the piracy centre in Malaysia. The British patrol boats explained that they could not do much until the pirates reached their base and notified authorities with the ransom demands. It was estimated that the boat would take about five days to reach the pirates' Somali base. But on the evening of the first day the signal disappeared.
"We thought that the pirates might have found the transmitter and cut the wire," Khun Wicharn recalled, "but then the next morning we heard the proud report from the Indian Navy that they had sunk a pirate mother ship. They released a photo showing a vessel with the superstructure on fire. They claimed that it had fired on them first."
There was a crew of 15 on the fishing boat: 14 Thais and one Cambodian fisherman. Khun Wicharn and his people were in shock and waited for more information.
Then six days later, their Yemeni office got a call that a ship had picked up an injured man from the sea who did not speak English. He turned out to be the Cambodian crewman and the only survivor. He told a very different story from that of the Indian Navy.
"He said that our boat was hijacked by the Somali pirates in the morning and they forced the Captain to move the vessel toward Somalia. Later in the afternoon, there was an unknown navy ship came on them. When the pirates saw them, they forced the crew to line up along the bulwarks as a human shield. This forced the navy ship to leave the boat but they still followed behind. When it became dark the same navy ship moved in and started firing on our boat.
"Our crew, realising that they were not to be saved, jumped into the dark sea. The navy vessel began to fire anyway and set the superstructure on fire. This corresponded with the location where the vessel disappeared from the vessel tracker. The pirates jumped into their fast skiff and raced away with the navy vessel in pursuit.
"Our crew said that an hour later the naval vessel returned and began firing at our boat again in order to sink it and destroy the evidence. Somehow the Cambodian, clinging to a bit of wreckage, was the only one to survive to tell the tale."
"We had ignored the news released by the Indian navy because we were misled by the location of the vessel that was sunk by them. They mentioned that the location was 285 nautical miles [527km] south west of Salalah (Oman) in which our vessel was about 30 nautical miles [55.5km] from Yemeni coast.
"But after our Cambodian crew told the story, we plotted on the navigation chart the last location where the vessel disappeared from the vessel tracker. It corresponded with the location where the vessel disappeared and the 285 nautical miles [527km] south west of Salalah (Oman) as claimed by the Indian Navy."
Khun Wicharn personally visited the Thai fishermen's families in northeast Thailand with the sad news.
He continues to seek appropriate reparations for their loss.
"The boat was registered in Kirabati and they are not prepared to take on the case themselves so we are trying to get them to authorise us to act on their behalf," he said. "But we have had no luck. As for the Thai government, which lost 14 citizens in the attack, there has been no interest in taking up the cause of their own nationals."
Frustrations in Indonesia: Ethical fishing thwarted
Frustration, as much as anger, marks Khun Wicharn's relations with Indonesia. In the 1990s, his company fished in their waters but since the death of an Indonesian friend who could intervene for him when trouble came up, he no longer fishes those waters. Other Thai fishing companies are bringing their vessels back as well.
"Even though you have a legal fishing permit, the Indonesian Navy will look through their binoculars at your vessel's name then look up the owner in the registry. Soon the owner will get a note saying that their vessel would be arrested unless a payment was made to specified bank account," he explained. "We call these the official pirates."
But even transiting Indonesian waters in the internationally recognised Straits of Malacca can be dangerous for Sirichai Fisheries' boats.
Khun Wicharn demonstrates an obstinate refusal to acknowledge corruption and he is persistent in his attempts to hold the judiciary to a positive ethical standard. When the Indonesian government charged one of his fishing boats with fishing in Indonesian waters on February 23, 2009 at the northern entrance to the Straits of Malacca, he refused to pay a bribe and agreed to see them in court.
The carefully researched and prepared documents for his defence ran to hundreds of pages. All of Khun Wicharn's fleet is equipped with vessel tracking technology that reports the vessel's location every half-hour to the shore based office. He took these records to the court to showed his ship on a steady course travelling at a steady seven knots. This is far too fast for trawl fishing. The tracking shows that only when they were stopped by the navy patrol boat and escorted to an Indonesian port did they come near the shore.
Further the navy claimed that the vessel had been fishing because it had a wet net on deck, Khun Wicharn countered that this was a small rag of web with no fittings to trawl and all of the boat's trawl nets were stowed in the hull until officials dragged them on deck for a shore side photo opportunity. He used local TV images to show an empty awning-covered deck when the boat was first brought into port. But the officials still claimed that the piece of net on deck when they stopped the boat was wet.
Khun Wicharn brought Indonesian weather records to courts to show that it had been raining. When the Indonesian officials argued that he had Indonesian lobsters in his frozen catch, he was able to demonstrate that the particular species that the boat had onboard occurs in the Somali waters, where they had been fishing, and along the west coast of India but is not found in the Eastern Indian Ocean.
He tabled in the court letters and permits from Puntland to show that he had caught the total catch in their waters and his captain had the log book in support of that claim.
Finally, in August of 2009, the judge found them not guilty of fishing in Indonesian waters but wanted the boat to be confiscated nonetheless. There was no choice at that point but to pay bribes to the judges, about five million Baht (US$154,000), in order to have the vessel released. There was, of course, no compensation for the crew expenses or the six months of lost fishing time. Sirichai Fisheries cost for that diversion was about US$300,000.
Eritrea, the "worst government in the world"
Khun Wicharn reserves the award of "worst government in the world" for Eritrea.
"In March of 2007 our boat was transiting a passage in the Red Sea 7.26 miles [[11.7lm] off the Eritrean coast at (Latitude 12.50.02 N & Longitude 43.11.00 E). "Their navy arrested our boat with 31 people on board including two Yemeni crewmembers, he said.
Government catch monitors claimed that the vessel had been fishing their waters. Khun Wicharn hired an Eritrean lawyer but the government transferred the case to a military court where lawyers were not allowed so Khun Wicharn had to represent himself.
"I challenged their claims about our vessel's location with our tracking data and the expert support of the French manufacturer."
The Eritrean Navy claimed to have tracked the fishing boat on GPS but could not demonstrate that they had the technical ability. They claimed to have seen the boat fishing with binoculars at night from a distance of about four miles (6.4km) from their shore navy base, but Khun Wicharn showed with the fishing boat's track that they never came nearer than seven miles (11.3km) offshore so this was not possible.
After hearing the evidence the judge could not make a decision so he postponed his findings. Each time Khun Wicharn had to fly back and forth from Thailand.
With costs mounting, he enlisted the help of the Government of Qatar which intervened on his part. A compromise was arranged whereby Sirichai Fisheries agreed to withdraw the case from the court in return for their boat and crew being released after having held them for 13 months. The fishing boat's 30,000 litres of fuel and catches of 34 tonnes were confiscated by the Eritrean Navy.
Heading home
At 58 years of age, Khun Wicharn is devoting more time than ever to the fishing community of Mahachai and Thailand. Construction is about to begin on a new 300-student kindergarten apart from the existing 3,000-student kindergarten and primary school system that his family has already built for the community. He is strongly committed to community based education.
"Recently a parent came and asked me to raise the school fees," he said, "I asked him why and he said that he did not want his kids going to school with those of cyclo drivers. I nearly threw him out of my office."
Khun Wicharn has also worked with his alumni, Chiang Mai University, to develop a satellite campus in Mahachai to offer a Masters Degree in Business and a PhD in Knowledge Management. Recognising that Thai universities offer Food Science programmes while Thailand has become one of the world's major seafood processors, he has developed courses in Seafood Science. He has written several books detailing proposals to improve fisheries management in Thailand but he is still not satisfied with the results.
He has built a Fisheries Museum in Mahachai but, with millions of baht invested, it remains a work in progress. He is now working on a proposal to establish a new Marine Fisheries Department for the Thai government in order to look after the complicated marine fishing activities, not just a General Fishery Department as at present.
The list of boards on which he serves, and government advisory positions that he occupies, is too extensive to list. He maintains an office in Bangkok for his position on the Thai Senate and a second office to fulfil his role as Honorary Consul for the Republic of Mozambique.
In spite of the hectic pace which he maintains in looking after his fishing operations and national commitments, Khun Wicharn regularly slows his day to visit his mother, Ngek-Noi. His father passed away recently, leaving her alone.
Her parents came from China in the early days of the 20th century. They had a farm with thousands of ducks, but Khun Wicharn's mother also took a rowboat out on to the Ta Chien River to buy fish from the boats that brought them from along the coast. One day she met a man there who worked as a skipper of a fishing boat from the next province, Samut Songkhran. In time the two married and later they started the fishing company that is now a global enterprise. At 82 she still rides her motorbike and is still an active and major shareholder in the family company.
For all his modern ambition, Khun Wicharn Sirichai-Ekawat remains passionately committed to his family and community.
Alan Haig-Brown