A mid-season whale wars update from the Sea Shepherd

by Jon Bowermaster on

The Sea Shepherd’s Southern Ocean season – dubbed “Operation No Compromise” — is more than half over and reports so far it may be having its best season of protest ever.

How to measure? Very few whales taken by the Japanese whaling fleet and no ships sunk on either side. Yet.

Of course there’s been plenty of verbal slugging since the season began in December, as well as the tossing of some literal bamboo spears, by the Japanese!

Lead-Shepherd Captain Paul Watson accused the Japanese of making a false “Mayday” distress call from the Southern Ocean last Friday, claiming it was “under attack” by the anti-whalers.

Watson admits he and his gang had deployed its typical weaponry: prop foulers (wire ropes intended to damage engines), and a fair number of stink and paint bombs – resulting in the return fire of those bamboo spears — but that they were hardly close to ramming the Japanese whaling ship.

“They said they were in distress and we were standing by,” Watson told the AP. “The ‘Gojira’ [the Shepherd’s new attack ship, named after Godzilla] is right beside them and they refuse to answer our calls.”
Truth is, according to Watson, it was the Japanese ship “Yushin Maru No. 3” which nearly cut the “Gojira” in half, coming just 10 feet from its hull.

Given the remoteness of the battleground, for now all we have is the he-said/she-said issuances of the two fighters. But all will be made clear later in the year, since for the fourth consecutive season a film crew from Animal Planet is on board documenting the campaign for “Whale Wars.”

It would appear that this year’s campaign strategy has paid off. Utilizing thee ships, a helicopter and 88 crewmembers the Shepherd’s have successfully chased the Japanese whaling fleet over 5,000 miles. Early in the season they isolated and cut off its refueling vessel – the “Sun Laurel” – even while being harassed by two of the Japanese’ three harpoon boats – which have focused on trailing the Shepherd’s rather than hunting whales.

Watson checked in from port in New Zealand, where he’d taken the Shepherd’s lead ship, the “Steve Irwin,” for fuel and supplies. He is optimistic about the season, suggesting it may be “our most successful yet.”

“They have taken very close to zero (whales),” he says, hoping this may be the last season the Shepherd’s presence will be required off Antarctica, hoping its non-stop harassment will finally encourage the Japanese to give up its “scientific” hunt.

Where whaling commission edicts and international protest have failed, a combination of the seaborne fights, new Japanese tax laws, falling meat sales and having been caught running a whale-meat black market, may succeed in stopping whaling in the Southern Ocean.

Success has apparently been felt on the fundraising front as well, since the Shepherd’s have recently raised a giant electronic billboard in Times Square depicting a breaching whale about to be harpooned. It is the media savvy non-profit’s first stab at outdoor advertising.

Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.

[Flickr image via gsz]

Underwater suburbia planned in “Aquatica”

by Jon Bowermaster on

Dreamers have been imagining human life undersea for centuries. The most successful in turning that dream into reality have come up with musty, mobile-home-like contraptions tethered to barges or hooked by massive hoses to land where committed marine biologists toil for a week or two.

Aquanaut and bioengineer Dennis Chamberland hopes to expand upon those successes by building the equivalent of suburbs on the sea floor, a region where there is admittedly unlimited space for expansion.

With thirty years at NASA under his helmet, Chamberland’s big-picture vision is dubbed “Aquatica” and he imagines it as the first underwater settlement for “permanent human colonization.”

He’s got the credentials (Mission Commander of seven NASA underwater missions) and is credited with successfully using the ocean as a testing ground for life in space. His Advanced Space Life Support Systems, built for NASA, created safe-living underwater environments for anyone living “off-planet.”

But they were small picture settlements, home to just two to four people.His goal for the past couple decades – while writing science books and sci-fi novels in his spare time – has been to figure out how communities can successfully live underwater for long extended time.

To prove the viability of his beliefs he’s already overseen the growing of crops in controlled settings on the ocean floor and built a two man undersea “habitat” set on the ocean floor off Key Largo, Florida, which has been visited by, among other, James Cameron.

His big hopes are to see the first children born undersea and thus imagines “Aquatica” being home to schools and hospitals as well as a place for ocean research.

He also imagines that if people are living undersea they’ll be better protectors of it, essentially creating “a human colony whose primary purpose is to monitor and protect this most essential of the earth’s biomass.”

There’s got to be a first step to suburban living undersea, of course, which is expected to be launched sometime next year with the lowering to the seabed an underwater house he’s dubbed “Leviathan” … which will initially be home to four people.

Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.

[Flickr image via sindhi]

2010 — a record year for Somali pirates

by Jon Bowermaster on

For all the “extremes” of the natural world in 2010 – record-setting rainfalls, droughts, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions – man managed to rack up some big numbers too.

Particularly those persistent Somali pirates who picked up the pace on the Indian Ocean, ramping up attacks on cargo boats, cruise ships and private yachts. According to an end of the year report by the Piracy Reporting Center of the International Maritime Bureau, there were more pirate attacks than ever, despite an ever-bigger presence of international navies.

Many thought that when snipers aboard the “USS Bainbridge” shot and killed three Somali kidnappers holding an American cargo boat captain hostage in 2009 that piracy would slow. Quite the opposite.

Turns out that in 2010 those khat-stoked, RPG-armed pirates in their wooden skiffs managed to outrun and out-maneuver some of the world’s most powerful navies in record numbers, attacking 445 ships and taking nearly 1,200 people hostage.

Already in this New Year, rather than shrink in the face of increased threats from authorities, the pirates have grown even bolder and are traveling even further from home. A week ago they went so far as to attempt to chase down a British cruise ship – the 348-passenger “Spirit of Adventure” – traveling from Madagascar to Zanzibar.While his black-tied passengers were sitting down to dinner Captain Frank Allica spied a speedboat in pursuit and floored the 9,570-ton ship in an effort to outrun what he knew were pirates. They were one hundred miles off the coast of Africa.

The ship’s guests and 200-crew members were ordered below decks, told to sit on the floor and keep doors barricaded as the speedboat pulled alongside.

(The story makes me wonder what those particular pirates were smoking. Even if they caught up with the ship and boarded it, loaded down as it were with more than 500 passengers and crew, what exactly did they think they would do with them all? Take them hostage??)

When the captain was successful at outrunning the pirates, guests were welcomed back to the dining room, their soup reheated. At breakfast the next morning the captain was given a standing ovation.

The pirate’s success in recent years has had impacts on both the cruise and cargo ship businesses.

Several cruise companies have quit the Indian Ocean completely, including Seabourn – which canceled 15 cruises in 2010 and 2011 — and Star Clippers. Several others – MSC Cruises, Fred Olsen and Hapag Lloyd – have changed itineraries to keep their ships as far away from potential run-ins as possible.

At the same time the cost of kidnap and ransom insurance has gone up for all ships, as have additional security costs, including hiring armed guards and, for some, wrapping ships with razor wire, grease and broken glass to deter potential boardings.

Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.

Robots in Antarctica? Closer than you think!

by Jon Bowermaster on

Who could have guessed that Antarctica – the world’s driest desert, where typically it barely snows during the summer months and the sun pounds down with nearly 24/7 predictability from November through February – that this season solar power would be proving a bust.

A Korean snowmobile expedition, hoping to reach the South Pole by machine using batteries charged by the sun, has been stymied by the same weather system that is producing those massive floods in Australia. The resulting heavy cloud cover and the most snow Antarctica has seen in two decades has stalled its efforts.

Options for the Koreans are to abandon and walk to the South Pole, or fill engines with gasoline (more likely), in order to get off the continent before winter sets in.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the crossing of Antarctica by pickup truck as well as the first vehicle to cross Antarctica by bio-fuel, which was judged a success … I guess … though it was followed by massive, six-wheeled, gas-guzzling trucks carrying gear and spare drivers.

Since Australian Douglas Mawson brought the first airplane to Antarctica, and Robert Falcon Scott brought trucks – all of which failed — maybe it’s time to admit that machines don’t belong on the 7th continent at all.
Which even as I type the words I realize is naïve, as each austral season man’s scientific and touristic footprints grow across Antarctica.

How about robots? It’s not far-fetched. The U.S. government is currently building a robot-driven caravan, which it hopes will help ferry fuel and supplies from the coastline base at McMurdo to its base at the South Pole.

The goal? To save human effort and risk and reduce man’s footprint.

The 1,500 mile long supply trip has been done the past two years – thanks to a road bladed by Americans — by a team of ten driving five giant tractors fitted with snowblades and dragging giant bladders of fuel behind. It takes 40 days to reach the South Pole and two weeks to return, obviously burning lots of gasoline in both directions.

The goal is to reduce the numbers of men to two and have the caravan run 24 hours a day, rather than the current 12-hour shift. Operations manager for the U.S. Antarctic Program George Blaisdell says the experimental robotic system, being developed by the NSF with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, should be ready to test later this year.

One current driver, Kristy Carney – who’s done the commute three times – questions how the remotely operated trucks will do in snowstorms and deal with crevasses.

“You get stuck all the time,” she says. “If one gets totally buried (by snowstorms), it will affect the whole line. I don’t know how that would work without enough people to dig it out.”

Maybe it’s time to leave the machines at home and re-introduce dogs to Antarctica; they have been banned since 1991, allegedly for fear of introducing disease to the seal population.

Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.

[Flickr image via rayandbee]

Whale Wars continue — despite Wikileaks

by Jon Bowermaster on

That the Sea Shepherd’s and Japanese whalers are skirmishing again — a recent tête-à-tête included the sling shotting of stink bombs (by the Shepherds) and false attempts to ram (by the Japanese) — the bigger news was the Wikileaks release of conversations between representatives of the U.S. government and their Japanese counterparts about how to shutdown the increasingly popular conservation group.

On the eve of a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in November 2009, a U.S. representative, Monica Medina, apparently broached the idea with senior officials from Japan’s Fisheries Agency of the possibility of revoking Sea Shepherd’s tax-exempt status.

On what basis? According to the leaked cable, first published on Wikileaks website and then in the Spanish daily El Pais, it was because the group “does not deserve tax exempt status based on their aggressive and harmful actions.”

In the past the Japanese have suggested if the Shepherd’s would stop chasing them, they might actually slow down their annual whale hunts. The group’s charismatic leader Paul Watson, for one, doesn’t trust them. “This is not about politics, it’s about economics,” he has said. “They will stop until they realize it is bad business, not because some government tells them to.”

In the cables both governments labeled the conservation group’s annual anti-whaling campaign an “irritant” in international relations.

Contacted by the AP aboard his ship Steve Irwin in the Southern Ocean, you could almost hear the glee in Watson’s reaction to the leaked cables, saying the secret talks proved Sea Shepherd was having an effect.

“We have had our tax status since 1981, and we have done nothing different since then to cause the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) to change that,” he said by telephone.

Meanwhile the daily cold war continues off the coast of Antarctica. For the past week the Sea Shepherd ships have been pursuing the Japanese factory ship the Nisshin Maru ever since finding the whaling fleet on December 31st. The pursuit has now covered a thousand miles.

If things continue like this – lots of harassment and engagement, few whales taken, no loss of life or ships and lots of media coverage — the Shepherd’s and Watson will be satisfied. As will the “Whale Wars” camera crews onboard documenting a fourth season.

This season’s campaign motto? “Operation No Compromise.” Watson’s goal is to cause enough distractions to force the whalers to give up and go home. For good.

Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.

[Flickr image via gsz]