Today at 9:56pm
January 13, 2010
Ironically, the most successful thing that Sea Shepherd does to save whales in the Southern Ocean is to do very little at all.I
Our confrontations with the Japanese whalers are dramatic, especially this year. We’ve already lost one of our three ships and engaged in water cannon and laser duels with the Japanese security forces.
It is, however, the chasing of the whaling fleet that impacts the kill quotas of the Japanese because whaling ships can’t kill whales when they are running.
And the Japanese whaling fleet is presently fleeing before us, doing what they do after every major confrontation with Sea Shepherd. We can always count on them to just simply pick up and run a few thousand miles from one side of their hunting area to the other.
Not a single whale has been killed in the last week since the sinking of the Ady Gil.
This year, the whalers began on the Eastern side of what they refer to as JARPA IV at the Longitude of 174 Degrees East. They are now running full out to the extreme Western side of JARPA IV to the Longitude of 70 Degrees East. This is a corridor of some two and a half thousand miles long and three hundred miles wide.
The chase has our two ships Steve Irwin and Bob Barker threading our way through a maze of icebergs of all shapes and sizes, skirting dangerous lurking growlers, through dense fog and blinding blizzards of freezing rain, sleet, snow, and hail, over rolling swells in the face of bone-chilling winds.
And it is these chases where the whales are saved. Dozens of whales would have died in the last week if not for the fact thatNisshin Maru and her posse of harpoon boats are running fast as far west as they can in an attempt to run us out of fuel. And once they stop we will pounce upon them again in another round of skirmishes and dramatic clashes.
And they will run again, but this, year unlike years past, we have two large fast ships to hound the Nisshin Maru, nipping at her heels to keep her on the run.
An American naval veteran once described being in the Pacific War with the Japanese as “long hours of boredom punctuated with moments of sheer terror.” We understand his sentiments perfectly.
It is hard to describe the sheer vastness of the area that we are hunting the Japanese whaling fleet in. Immense it certainly is, as we work our way across a 2,500-mile corridor of open ocean, searching an area of over 750,000 square nautical miles.
It is the equivalent of driving off road from Sydney to Perth across the Australian Outback searching for a caravan of eight vehicles. Toss in dust storms, thunderstorms, and bushfires, and it will give you an idea of the challenges we need to overcome.
But the one great advantage that I have is a strange sense of where the whalers are. Since 1975, when my fellow crewmembers and I first found the Soviet whaling fleet in the North Pacific, I have always had an unexplainable ability to know where the whales and the whalers are. It is hard to describe, but in regard to the whalers, I feel them ahead of me or behind me or wherever they may be, like a cold blanket of evil that sends a silent shudder up the back of my spine to the nape of my neck.
We have this fleet in our sights now. We will keep them in our sights and we will intercept them and we will harass them and we will do everything within the boundaries of the law and morality to diminish their ability to inflict death on the most gentle and intelligent sentient beings in the sea.
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No whales have been killed for a week ... Japanese losses are growing!
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