Sea Hunt

Well, that didn’t take long.

Minutes after Ranger Sergei Belotsky powers our motorboat from Bukhta Expeditsy (Expedition Bay) into the greater Sea of Japan, workers on a launch from a nearby clam farm wave us over.

Four men, they say, are diving in a restricted zone in the nearby Far Eastern State Marine Preserve, where Belotsky works. Poachers, maybe. If we hurry, we might catch them red-handed.

Belotsky opens up the throttle, and our boat slaps across the sea, hanging a hard left after we pass a rocky promontory skirted by crashing waves.

Belotsky had just been describing how poachers, Russian and North Korean, were depleting sea life in this remote, beautiful preserve south of Vladivostok. Under the cover of night or bad weather, North Korean fishermen in unseaworthy boats putter across the Tumen River – the border between the two countries – into Russian waters in order to net calamari. And the Primorye region’s home-grown poachers – gonzo divers with speedboats, GPS units and an excess of moxie – are illegally harvesting sea cucumbers and exporting them through criminal syndicates to China.

Ranger Belotsky was ferrying our family (along with the preserve’s tourism director and his daughter) to Furugelm Island, a former military outpost converted into a park. But poaching trumps tourism, so we are all suddenly part of an unplanned enforcement action.

Shortly, we catch sight of four beefy men in wetsuits diving off a red inflatable boat in shallow waters. Belotsky powers alongside.

“You guys know you’re in prohibited territory?” he says. “What are you catching here?”

“Oh, we’re not catching anything,” a diver says. “We’re just using our camera to film the seafloor.”

Yeah, right. But they have no catch aboard to suggest that they’re lying, so Belotsky chases them off with a warning. Then he wheels the boat around and heads toward Furugelm.

The adventure had begun on a fine August day, when we drove down to the southern end of Primorye Region from Vladivostok, where my wife, Nonna, and I lived for five years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was a chance for our youngest son, Lev, 12, to bond with his cousins over the universal culture of gaming (they’re big on Minecraft in Russia, too). When Nonna’s mother and stepfather invite us to their dacha in the village of Andreyevka, Alexander Kulikov – the preserve’s tourism director and an old friend – offers to show us his turf, down along the North Korean border.

It is a four-hour drive down a rutted road from Vladivostok to our launch point in the town of Posyet, and Kulikov passes the time telling us about the region, where the sea, windswept cedars, and valleys that open into meandering estuaries all hint at traditional Chinese landscapes. We pass through a tunnel cut into a mountain (to allow endangered Amur leopards to stroll overhead without crossing a road), and Kulikov fills us in on stories of its construction (it did not come in under budget). This is the region Mikhail Prishvin made famous in his novel Jen Sheng: The Root of Life.

Southern Primorye – a talon of Russia flanked by China, North Korea and the Sea of Japan – is sparsely populated, but it shares a long kinship with the Hermit Kingdom. The area was once under the control of a Korean-Mohe empire known as Bohai, which existed from 698 to 926 a.d. in Manchuria. In the 1860s, Tsar Alexander II invited Koreans to migrate here, providing they embraced the Orthodox faith. A hundred years later, Stalin exiled their descendants en masse to Central Asia.

Kulikov’s SUV bumps into Posyet, a town that Crown Prince Nicholas, later Tsar Nicholas II, visited during his 1891 tour of Russia’s East. But there is little hint of imperial glory in Posyet these days. The port is large enough for coal freighters to dock, but as we motor through we meet several cows who have decided that the main road through town is the ideal place to chew cud.

Belotsky motors his boat up onto a shingle beach lined by dilapidated cottages, and we head out, together with Kulikov and his daughter, Maria. Despite clear and sunny skies, and apart from the aforementioned divers, the sea was mostly empty.

That’s no surprise. Russian and North Korean poachers are cautious when they sneak into the 63,000-hectare preserve, 97 percent of which is water. “They usually come out in bad weather or when visibility is low,” Belotsky says.

Rangers catch 30-40 Russian poachers a year, but many more get away, he says. They tend to be locals from places like Khasan, a Russian town along the Chinese and North Korean border. If rangers try to nab the poachers, they flee, ignoring orders to halt. Often the poachers carry guns, and sometimes they fire warning shots to scare off the unarmed rangers. Though border guards, who operate outside the preserve, carry weapons, Belotsky only packs a toy gun, sort of as a joke. His grandson gave it to him “for protection.” If poachers are caught on shore, they will sometimes pounce on the outnumbered rangers and assault them in order to escape.

Russian poachers work with criminal syndicates that export sea cucumbers – marine animals that live on the sea floor and are a popular delicacy – from the Primorye Region into neighboring China. Fresh sea cucumber fetches $6 to $35 per kilo; when dried, it sells in China for $1,000 per kilo. A good haul for the poachers is 200 kilos of sea cucumber per day.

“It’s completely prohibited to catch them in Primorye, but they catch them and dry them and manage to transfer them to China,” Kulikov says. “There’s a big demand in China, and there are not enough jobs in the Khasan region. So it’s a major temptation.”

Poaching increased dramatically after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kulikov says. Russian aid to North Korea was slashed, reducing the importance of Khasan as a railroad transit point. Hard times also shuttered Khasan-area industrial enterprises, throwing workers out of their jobs. As tensions eased between Russia and China, both countries redeployed their military units away from the border. This cut the income for locals who were involved in service businesses contracting with the military.

“The main reason for poaching is lack of jobs,” Kulikov says.

The Russian population’s mobility is far lower than in America, so it is harder for people to leave a backwater like Khasan when the economy goes bust. “When the troops were reduced, many retired military settled in the area, but they couldn’t compete with the locals in the labor market,” Kulikov says.

The rangers are poorly equipped compared to the poachers, so often they just shoo the intruders away, rather than arresting them.

However harmful their poaching, you can’t deny that the local divers have guts. They have powerful boats with satellite navigation, Kulikov says, and they wear cold weather wetsuits that allow them to descend to the seafloor even in winter, when Primorye’s coastal seas freeze. Poachers drop off divers in the night, leave them to gather sea cucumbers, crabs, and scallops on the sea bottom, and then return later to pick them up. Even on the seafloor, however, divers can hear rangers’ boats approaching, and sometimes they surface rapidly in order to escape – an extremely dangerous practice for a diver. All of this makes it difficult for rangers to catch them in the act.

“It’s a big problem,” Belotsky says. “They take a serious amount of stuff from the seafloor.”

Furugelm Island is a steep-cliffed outcropping with a sandy beach that is popular with tourists. Half a dozen boats are tied up on the shore, some of them from Vladivostok. Women in bikinis sunbathe, children play in the sand, and hearty gents in tiny swim trunks gather in uproarious scrums to toss down vodka shots.

On the shore are a couple of huts, and we settle around a table in one of them where you borrow a cup to swig your beverage of choice – mineral water, vodka, Coke or kvas. The sanitation protocol is simple: you swish your cup around in the sea afterward and then leave it for the next visitor.

Though the island shares Primorye’s northern climate, rangers advertise it as Russia’s southernmost island. Furugelm lies at 42.5 degrees north, the same latitude as central Corsica and one degree south of Sochi. On the hot summer day when we visit, the bay is aquamarine and the weather feels almost Mediterranean.

Tourism nets the preserve $91,000 a year, or one-sixth of its annual budget, Kulikov says. That’s a significant sum, given that the preserve’s director, Sergei Dolganov, recently told Zolotoy Rog newspaper that the preserve’s budget plummeted 18 percent in 2016. As a result, the park’s budget is not sufficient to cover salaries, gas for patrol boats, and other necessities, Kulikov says.

Some 20,500 tourists visited the preserve last year, most of them Russian. They stay in several small resorts in the eastern part of the preserve, and boats deliver them from the vacation town of Andreyevka to Furugelm to bask in the sun and swim in its clear waters.

One frequent visitor is Maria Melnik, an accountant in a construction materials company. In the summer she works as a guide and leads tour groups to Furugelm and Falshivy. Last summer she organized a volunteer clean-up of Orlinka Bay in the preserve.

“What attracts me is that this is a preserve and it’s hard to get access to it,” Melnik says. “It is a heavenly beauty – the emerald water, an incredible amount of animals and birds. When you go there in May and step into the birds’ bazaar, you can’t even see the sky. It feels like the sky is moving.”

Occasionally, a bird will reject its young, pushing fledglings from their nests, Melnik says. Rangers adopt them, feed them and try to teach them to fly. “In the wild, 90 percent of them die, but here they survive,” she says.

After several hours on the island, we re-board Belotsky’s boat and head down toward the North Korean border, to a peninsula known as Falshivy (“False”), so named because it’s a false island that storm tides sometimes cut off from the mainland. From there you can look across a bird-filled estuary right into China and North Korea.

Today the only visitors to Falshivy are rangers and their guests. There are several cabins on a low bluff overlooking a vast beach that stretches 39.4 kilometers to the North Korean border, along the Tumen River.

Each year, in the southern district of the marine preserve, rangers seize about 10 North Korean vessels that have slipped into the preserve to poach, Belotsky says. In 2016 the number declined, possibly because the border guards have stepped up their efforts outside the preserve.

Some North Koreans drift north accidentally because they lack satellite navigational systems or even compasses. But others slip into Russia intentionally and try to flee authorities who spot them, Kulikov says. They often smash their compasses when rangers or border guards pursue them, so they can claim they were lost.

Fishermen from the destitute Asian nation harm more than just the marine life. The long, empty beach stretching from the Falshivy outcropping offers inspiring views, but is littered with torn North Korean nets and cheap Styrofoam floats.

North Korean boats are poorly made and sink easily. Often arresting the poachers amounts to rescuing them from the water after their vessels sink. On one foggy day, Belotsky recalls, he motored up to help four North Koreans clinging to their capsized boat, when he and his crew glimpsed another vessel trying to escape.

The rangers pursued the second vessel until they noticed the waters were growing muddy – a sign they were approaching the river mouth that marks the Russian-North Korean border. So they backed off and returned to haul aboard the stranded sailors.

Poachers also sometimes flee just outside the marine preserve boundaries, where the rangers have no authority to make arrests.

North Koreans who are seized are repatriated, Belotsky says. Their boats are leaky and old, however, and sending them back to North Korea involves an enormous amount of red tape. So the rangers simply tow them onto a beach, where they are abandoned.

“We drag it out of the sea and put it on a shore, and it’s useless,” Belotsky says.

The photographer Marina Sklyarova, who lives in the region, recalled one summer day when she and her husband, a videographer, were standing on the high point of Furugelm Island, watching the sea. The rangers seized a North Korean boat, so they raced down to get it on film.

“There were twelve little guys sitting on the boat, hiding their faces,” she says. “They all were very depressed, because they would be turned over to the police. They knew the situation would be very bad for them when they got home.”

While enforcement can put a dent in North Korean cross-border poaching, a change in attitudes is required among Russians in the hardscrabble border region. The preserve is also trying to use education as a tactic. Staff members give talks in schools about the wildlife of the preserve and how children can contribute to saving it.

Perhaps environmental tourism will change attitudes, too, as visitors come to dive, snorkel, motor around in speedboats, and hike trails on the islands and mainland shore. As their eyes are opened by the beauty of the region, Kulikov hopes, they will want to save the environment, too.

As we settle in for the night at Falshivy, the stars emerge. Near the border here there is little light pollution, and the Milky Way is spectacular. Nearby villages are small, major Chinese cities are far away, and North Korea is almost entirely without electrical power, as nighttime satellite photographs of the country attest. At 10:30 p.m., I wake Lev, who loves astronomy, and drag him outside for a view.

“Wow,” he says sleepily.

“You won’t see that back in Chicago,” I say.

There is, however, one source of light pollution, but oddly, it comes from the sea. It’s the lights of North Korean fishing boats, creeping north to cast their nets. RL