Sea Shepherd Chases the Japanese Whalers into Yesterday

22nd Jan­u­ary 2012

The Japan­ese whal­ing fleet are not where they should be this time of year.

Last year the fleet was oper­at­ing in the Ross Sea. This year their “sci­en­tif­ic sur­vey” was sup­posed to take place in the waters south and west of Tas­ma­nia, east and south of South Africa.

Every year they alter­nate. But not this year! Although the whalers attempt­ed to begin their killing oper­a­tions in the waters south­west of Aus­tralia, the Sea Shep­herd ships have chased the entire whal­ing fleet ever east­ward. At 1700 hours AEST, the Bob Bark­er encoun­tered the Yushin Maru No. 3 at 66 Degrees, 22 min­utes South and 179 Degrees, 05 min­utes West.

From being inter­cept­ed 500 miles west of Fre­man­tle, Aus­tralia, the Japan­ese fleet has run over 4,500 nau­ti­cal miles for the last 30 days, all the way into the Ross Sea, far to the East of Aus­tralia. This is an aver­age of 150 miles a day, leav­ing very lit­tle time to kill whales with only one har­poon ves­sel. The oth­er two har­poon ves­sels have either been tail­ing or search­ing for the Sea Shep­herd ships.

“You can say we chased the whale killers into yes­ter­day since we have crossed the Inter­na­tion­al Date Line,” said Cap­tain Paul Wat­son, of the Sea Shep­herd ship Steve Irwin. “This illus­trates that they real­ly have no sci­en­tif­ic agen­da at all since their so-called sur­vey requires them to “sam­ple” whales from the two dif­fer­ent areas alter­na­tive­ly each year. This is not about sci­ence and it nev­er has been. It’s not even about prof­it any­more because we have negat­ed their prof­its. It’s sim­ply about pride. Whal­ing in the South­ern Ocean has become a heav­i­ly sub­si­dized wel­fare project for an archa­ic indus­try that has no place in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry.”

Sea Shepherd’s cam­paign, Oper­a­tion Divine Wind, has been chal­leng­ing this year due to the thir­ty mil­lion dol­lars allo­cat­ed to the whal­ing fleet for added secu­ri­ty. This mon­ey was tak­en from the tsuna­mi and earth­quake relief fund.

“They have ten mil­lion dol­lars for every one mil­lion dol­lars we have to finance our three ships,” said Cap­tain Alex Cor­nelis­sen of the Bob Bark­er. “They have the full sup­port of their gov­ern­ment and lit­er­al­ly have a license to kill because if any of us are injured or killed, their gov­ern­ment will back them and jus­ti­fy their actions. Our gov­ern­ments con­demn us just for toss­ing rot­ten but­ter on their decks.”

The chase across the bot­tom of the world involves five ships from the Japan­ese whal­ing fleet and two ships from Sea Shep­herd. The third Sea Shep­herd ship, the Brigitte Bar­dot, was dam­aged by heavy seas and had to return to Fre­man­tle, Aus­tralia for repairs.

Nev­er before has the Japan­ese whal­ing fleet aban­doned one des­ig­nat­ed whal­ing “sur­vey” area for anoth­er. Sea Shep­herd has appar­ent­ly seri­ous­ly dis­rupt­ed the Japan­ese whal­ing plan for this sea­son and has cost them a huge amount in fuel costs. In addi­tion, two of the three har­poon ves­sels have been tak­en away from killing whales in order to tail the Steve Irwin and the Bob Bark­er. The Yushin Maru No. 2 is tail­ing the Steve Irwin and the Yushin Maru No. 3 is tail­ing the Bob Bark­er. This has left only the Yushin Maru to hunt for whales.

Sea Shep­herd has been able to keep the whal­ing fleet on the move and con­tin­ues to track their move­ments by rely­ing on drone oper­a­tions and ten years of expe­ri­ence fol­low­ing the pre­dictable move­ments of the whalers.

Last sea­son the Bob Bark­er was able to chase the Nis­shin Maru all the way to the tip of South Amer­i­ca before they quit and returned to Japan in humil­i­a­tion after tak­ing only sev­en­teen per­cent of their kill quo­ta.