From April 20th until April 22th 2016 a number of coast guard partners joined forces for operation Opera. Teams of the maritime and river police, customs, sea fisheries service and FPS Public Health boarded the patrol vessel Pollux of the Belgian navy. Together, they carried out inspections off the Belgian coast, aided by the surveillance airplane of the Management Unit of the North Sea Mathematical Models (MUMM) and the Maritime Security Centre Belgium (MIK) in Zeebrugge.
Three days of intensive cooperation resulted in approximately 300 administrative inspections and 9 physical inspections on board of different vessels, so called 'boardings'. In case of infractions or violations, an official warning was issued and /or a report filed. If you know that such boardings can easily take up to two hours and involve quite some paperwork, it is clear that our coast guard partners did a very good job.
