Former British policeman is battling to save Cambodia's coastline

The tall, tattooed Englishman has, he admits, an unusual job. Paul Ferber, leader and founder of the group Marine Conservation Cambodia, spends his nights waiting in the darkness of the Gulf of Thailand to catch criminals.

It might be pitch black but nothing can hide the sound. It's the roar from rusty engines which alerts the 38-year from Cumbria, who now lives on a private research island, Koh Seh, near the Vietnamese border. Like firemen responding to a call, he and his team rush to their wooden boat and into the blackness.

They are in pursuit of illegal fishermen, whose destructive trawling has devastated Cambodia’s coastal ecosystems almost to a point of no-return. For Paul and the crewmen, the dangerous patrols to chase boats and confiscate their gear and catches are a near nightly ritual. In a country dogged by corruption and widespread law breaking, they remain one of the sole forces fighting back against the trawlers. And they’re putting up a good battle.

“It’s not just dealing with illegal fishing boats. It’s about dealing with what’s under there,” said Paul, pointing out towards the sparkling sea off the remote island.

Much of the marine space around the island is designated a Marine Protection Area — off-limits to commercial fishermen. When MCC first arrived there last year, after working several years on an island nearer the mainland, the underwater world was “in a really bad state” because of the illegal trawlers, whose outlawed weighted nets kick up silt and uproot vital seagrass beds, along with vacuuming much else.

To mitigate the destruction, the group oversees a variety of interrelated projects: species breeding programmes, community outreach and education, artificial reef building, government consulting and, most importantly in Paul's mind, trawler chasing. Now, sea grass is regrowing offering important shelter to crabs and other marine organisms, and seahorses are also starting to make a slow comeback.

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But Paul, a self-described “uneducated lout” who originally hails from Appleby-in-Westmorland, is not strictly speaking a marine biologist. He has no degree in the subject (he dropped out of school at 14). Everything he knows — and that’s quite a lot — he learnt independently and through his great love: diving.

When not chasing criminal fishing boats, he's schooling a team of international volunteers on Koh Seh in such obscure skills as differentiating between seagrass species during environmental assessment dives or tagging wild seahorses.

It was not a natural-found passion. Before relocating to south-east Asia, Paul laboured on and off in construction before working as a policeman for two years in Whitehaven, Cumbria. He grew resentful of the English “rat-race” and, as many in his generation did, bought a one-way plane ticket to somewhere faraway.

It was a search for fulfillment that brought Paul to Asia but it was a scuba tank that brought him to Cambodia. He arrived in 2006 with a job as a diving instructor in Sihanoukville, a port city in the south.

He’d earned his PADI certification a few years earlier in Thailand (where he met his Thai wife Sao) and then went to Malaysia, where he trained and worked under the teaching of a sagacious Chinese instructor named Eric, a man who Paul cites as a pivotal force in his transformation into a marine conservationist.

He founded MCC in 2008 - getting two ornate seahorses tattoed across his chest to symbolise his dream of saving the creatures, which are dying in the illegal fishing nets.

The organisation raises money through volunteers and interns who pay to help out, which is then used to sustain the conservation and research efforts and support the wages of Cambodian staff.

Paul, who has four young children, is beginning to see the fruits of his tireless and bank account-draining labour. The Cambodian government, notoriously wary of foreign activists, has recently given the MCC the green light to continue its patrols, even assigning an official from the Ministry of Fisheries to sometimes accompany them, AK-47 in hand. Koh Seh was provided to MCC by the government.

Still, he warned, it is a constant battle and one that must be fought on many fronts. The trawlers, the reef building, the breeding programmes, the community outreach; each piece is vital to the puzzle.

“Everything’s linked in basically,” he said. Behind him the sun dipped behind the gulf, a prelude to another night of maritime cat-and-mouse. “It just takes time.”

Find out more at marineconservationcambodia.org