How many fishing boats [that reached beyond the permitted fishing zone] do you estimate would be confiscated?It depends on the tension and the commanders. But there were months where every weekend they’d try to make confiscations. There’s a limit to what you can do, so you say, “We’ll do an isolation.”

So isolation includes both an arrest and the confiscation of a boat?Yes. If they managed to run away on another boat, then you just take their boat, but that wouldn’t usually happen. We used to pull nets out of the water for no reason, but they stopped doing this because they’re scared they may be booby-trapped. They used to also waste a lot of bullets just shooting at nets.

Why shoot at nets in the sea?To drown them, because if they’re beyond the permitted range, then they (the fishermen) would definitely come back at some point to get them, so you just try to drown them.

Fishermen who come, do they put the net down and then return to it a few days later?Yes.

So if you come across a net, you’d just automatically shoot at it?If it was outside the border (the allocated fishing zone) yes, that was easiest, the most convenient, to just shoot at them. No range limits, no nothing, you just shoot. You’d have to ask for authorization from an officer of some rank. Sometimes we’d be stuck for ages until we managed to drown it, when we did drown it we weren’t sure we managed to drown it, there was a lot of waste of ammunition.