The Tonga Trench Project History

The tonga trench project history is as follows:

We started to develop our research plans in 2005 with the idea to study offshore whale species which are hardly researched yet in a place where we can investigate these creatures close to land, with a low budget compared to other offshore studies.

We also wanted to study a geographic area which is little researched, since there are still so many in the world. As far as marine mammal research is concerned major parts of the African and Asian coastline as well as Oceania are almost untouched. Research is concentrated around indutrialized countries, that means mainly at European, North American, Australian and New Zealand coastlines.

We decided on Oceania where we found deep waters close to several islands of Fiji and Tonga.

In 2006 we travelled to several places in both countries to check the infrastructure, the oceanic conditions around these islands and to find out, if the local people would like our project and what species they have observed.

'Eua island seemed to be the perfect place with very deep waters to its eastern side. We worked out a research plan and applied for funding to several organizations but without success.

In September 2008 we arrived in Tonga and started observations from land.

We collected a lot of data about spinner dolphins and humpback whales but we also realized fast that the area we can cover is too small. We like to know where the whales and dolphins are when we can't see them from our land observation platform and we like to study other species like sperm whales, sei whales and pantropical spotted dolphins, too, which we could see on the horizon but never close enough to get valid data.

Consequently we needed a boat. Since acoustic recordings are part of our research we decided to look for a sail boat. Three were available in Tonga, one big catamaran, too expensive for our budget, one GRP sail boat with a broken mast and still too expensive and a nice steel boat which turned out to be sold already when we rang the owner.

So we went to New Zealand in May 2009 to continue our search there. After we have travelled through the whole country to get an overview about the market we found „our sail boat“ in Napier. It took us three months to repair, maintain and turn a pleasure craft into a research vessel.

In October 2009 we finally left Napier to sail over to Tonga. In November we started a pilot phase of data collection from the boat.

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