Sea Shepherd Dancing Dangerously With the Outlaw Whaling Fleet in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary

11 Jan­u­ary 2012

The nau­ti­cal chess pieces con­tin­ue to move and the board keeps chang­ing in the South­ern Ocean Whale Sanc­tu­ary.

11 Jan­u­ary 2012

The nau­ti­cal chess pieces con­tin­ue to move and the board keeps chang­ing in the South­ern Ocean Whale Sanc­tu­ary.

The Shonan Maru #2 is no longer chas­ing the Steve Irwin. The secu­ri­ty ves­sel has been replaced by the har­poon ves­sel Yushin Maru #2. It is assumed that the Shonan Maru #2 will now head west towards the Aus­tralian cus­toms ves­sel Ocean Pro­tec­tor to turn over the three Aus­tralian pris­on­ers onboard. With the Yushin Maru #2 now fol­low­ing the Steve Irwin, and the Yushin Maru #3 still at Mac­quar­ie Island, the Nis­shin Maru now has only one har­poon ves­sel left — the Yushin Maru.

Sea Shep­herd has tem­porar­i­ly lost drone con­tact with the Nis­shin Maru and can­not guar­an­tee that whal­ing has not begun. If so, it will pro­ceed with two of the three har­poon ves­sels not involved in killing oper­a­tions. “If we had one more ship, there would be no pos­si­bil­i­ty of any whales dying,” said Cap­tain Paul Wat­son. “In July I met with Green­peace rep­re­sen­ta­tives at the IWC and request­ed of them that they send one ship to sup­port us. I told them that one more ship would shut down this entire fleet. They refused, and that is deeply dis­ap­point­ing, and as a result whales may die.”

Sea Shep­herd is work­ing to secure a third large, fast, ice-strength­ened ves­sel to return next sea­son. The Sea Shep­herd fast scout ves­sel Brigitte Bar­dot remains in Fre­man­tle under­go­ing repairs from dam­age caused by the extreme weath­er con­di­tions of the South­ern Ocean.

“We have demon­strat­ed that we can shut these poach­ers down and every year we become more effec­tive than the year before. One more ship will give us the abil­i­ty to throw a blan­ket of inter­ven­tion over them that will com­plete­ly extin­guish their ille­gal oper­a­tions,” said Cap­tain Paul Wat­son.

The drop­ping away of the Shonan Maru #2 removes the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the trans­fer of the three For­est Res­cue men to the Steve Irwin. The trans­fer of the men to the Steve Irwin would have saved the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars. Mean­while despite being ordered out of the ter­ri­to­r­i­al waters of Australia’s Mac­Quar­ie Island, the Yushin Maru #3 con­tin­ues to ille­gal­ly remain inside the twelve mile ter­ri­to­r­i­al lim­it.

“The Japan­ese whalers act like they own the entire South­ern Ocean,” said Bob Bark­er Cap­tain Alex Cor­nelis­sen of the Nether­lands. “They go where they want, when they want, and do what they want, with com­plete con­tempt for Aus­tralian sov­er­eign­ty.”