Back on the Remeliik, I passed the time reading a confidential investigation report about the 2012 Cessna incident, which had been leaked to me by a Palauan official. It in­­cluded transcripts of interviews with the 25 fishermen from the illegal Chinese boats, who had been arrested and held in the Koror jail for 17 days. Most of the men had never been to sea before, nor did they know the name of their ship, the fishing company or even their captain. Most had handed their identity cards over to the fishing company, which had hired them only several months earlier. Many claimed that they fled that day because they thought the Palauans, who were not in uniform, were planning to rob them. ‘‘He claims that he does not know about any fishing permits,’’ a police investigator said of one deckhand. ‘‘They only follow what the captain tells them.’’

The crew members pleaded guilty and were fined $1,000 each. Their small fast boat was destroyed, their gear confiscated. They were then flown home, with their slain colleague, Yong Lu, in a coffin, on a charter flight sent by the Chinese government. One line in the investigation report struck me. It said that in several days of poaching, the Chinese crew caught fewer than a dozen fish, primarily lapu lapu, and several large clams, most of which they later threw overboard as they fled the authorities. It seemed a tragically small yield.

In the wheel room of the Remeliik that night, the officers did a post mortem about the day’s boarding, and the discussion turned to the crews that work on these poacher ships. ‘‘Aren’t they the enemy?’’ I asked. Several officers shook their heads to say no. Once the authorities take the foreign crews to shore, there is no guarantee that Palau will have the translators to communicate with them, jail space to hold them or even the laws to effectively prosecute them. Many of the poachers they arrest are from family-owned businesses and are unable to pay the $500,000 fine Palau has the option to levy. The government can seize the ship, but the cost to feed, house and repatriate the crew is often more than its resale value.

Near the end of our patrol, Baiei asked me if I had ever seen a diver with the bends. I said I hadn’t. He explained that many of the poachers they chase are Vietnamese, young divers who target sea cucumbers, which live on the ocean floor and look like giant, leather-skinned slugs. The Vietnamese crewmen hold rubber hoses in their mouths attached to an onboard air compressor, strap lead weights around their waists, then dive, often deeper than a hundred feet. During an arrest last year, Baiei said, one of these divers shot to the surface too quickly, causing excruciating bubbles to form in his joints and elsewhere. They took him to a hospital to recover. ‘‘He just kept moaning for days,’’ Baiei said.

One of the other officers, who had been listening to the conversation quietly, looked up from his inspection logs. ‘‘They’re the real bycatch,’’ he said. For Palau’s police, the catch — the far more elusive target — was the fishing companies who send these desperate men to sea to flout the law. But in a sense, even those bosses are bycatch, too, in a worldwide fishing economy where sanctioned corporations, far more than poachers, are stripping the oceans of life. To save Palau’s fish, and the world’s, the law and its enforcers need to bring an entire industrial system to heel: a mission that requires a level of international cooperation and political will that has yet to materialize.