The effect of Japan’s tsunami on whaling

by Jon Bowermaster on

In an ironic twist of fate, Japan’s recent tsunami may have accomplished something conservationists have been fervently attempting for years: Driving a final nail into its pro-active whaling communities.

The first outsiders only recently reached the small town of Ayukawahama, which was crushed by thirty-foot waves. So was the headquarters of the biggest business in town, Ayukawa Whaling, one of the country’s most prodigious hunters of big whales.

The waves rushed six hundred feet inland, wiping out 80 percent of the town’s 700 homes. Four hundred of its 1,400 residents are missing, assumed dead. The peninsula town is described as having been reduced to “an expanse of splintered wood and twisted cars.”

In these days two weeks after the natural disaster the impact on the whaling town carries a kind of finality. Ayukawa lives off whaling. It is one of just four communities in Japan home to small fleets that twice a year hunt whales in waters close to Japan, differentiating them from the fleet that heads to the Southern Ocean each November.

“There is no Ayukawa without whaling,” said a 27-year-old whaler.The four boats of Ayukawa Whaling were sucked out to sea by the retreating tsunami waves, thrown back onto shore a mile down the coastline. The company’s 28 employees ran for the hills. All survived but have now been laid off.

The company’s chairman told the New York Times that while he hoped to rebuild the factory, refloat the company’s boats and get back to hunting whales, he admitted it wouldn’t be any time soon. It will take months and lots of money to pull his boats back onto the sea; his processing plant for whale meat was reduced to splinters.

Nearby the daughter of a 54-year-old woman scavenging for food found a tin of whale meat among the debris. “I wish we could eat whale meat every day,” said the 17-year-old. “But the whalers are so old, I think they’ll just quit or retire after what has happened.

“I think whaling is dead here.”

During the height of the Southern Ocean campaign which usually runs from November to March, many news stories can make it seem like whale hunting – and whale meat eating — is a passion for all Japanese. The reality is that Japan does not thrive on whale meat and there are increasingly fewer companies engaged in whale hunting.

Despite the success of the Sea Shepherd’s this past season – its successful harassment forcing the Japanese to end its season early and reducing its take by some 75 percent, to less than 200 whales – the tsunami waves may ultimately get credit for stopping the hunt.

If you follow the exploits of Sea Shepherd and its outspoken leader, Captain Paul Watson, you’d think they might be celebrating aboard its mother ship, the “Steve Irwin.” But Watson’s public reaction has been appropriately muted:

“Nature does not play favorites and just as the earthquake struck New Zealand recently, the fires ravaged Australia two years ago, and the tsunami struck India and Thailand not so very long ago, the message is clear — we all share the dangers of living on the water planet called earth,” he wrote.

“In the face of such peril from the forces of nature, we are all equal.

I have heard many people say that Japan’s tragedy is karma. People who say such things do not understand the concept of karma. This earthquake struck Japan purely on the basis of geography and geology.”

In another twist, the Japanese factory processing ship “Nisshin Maru,” which the Shepherd’s had hounded back to port a month early, is being used by the Japanese government to deliver aid supplies (charcoal, 100,000 noodle cups, kerosene, cranes) to the hard-hit north.

“Sea Shepherd believes that the ‘Nisshin Maru’ should be permanently converted into a humanitarian aid vessel,” suggested its website.

But the Japanese have rebuilt from the dust before and started over, with great success. One Ayukawa whaler was quoted two days after the tsunami: “As long as there are people who will carry on whaling in the absence of vessels or facilities, whaling could be revived … eventually.”

Eleuthera Island, Bahamas – “Fishing is a Good Life Here”

by Jon Bowermaster on

French Leave, Eleuthera — Under a cloud-studded sunrise at the end of the two-and-a-half-mile long beach I watch a 14-foot plywood boat back into the morning surf. A trio of Bahamian men readies it for a day of spearfishing along the near-reef that parallels the 110-mile long island. One will drive; another will watch and stack fish. The third – a lithe, fair-skinned black man with ‘Aries’ tattooed on his upper arm, who dons a thick wetsuit while we talk – will dive and spear. They hope the day’s catch will include as many as 40 grouper, maybe another 40 lobster.

The laws for all fishermen in the Bahamas are pretty straightforward, no matter the size of the boat or crew: Boats must be 100 percent owned by Bahamians. They can use seine nets, hook and line or — ‘Aries’ tool of choice this morning — the Hawaiian sling and spear. There can be no long lines, no chemicals or explosives in the Bahamas. The small fishermen have no GPS or fish finders. Bigger boats, mostly based at the north end of the island, have set up what the locals refer to as “condominiums,” slatted wooden traps to catch lobsters.

The day will take this trio 30 miles down the coast and back and will end by early afternoon, when they will take whatever they’ve caught across the island to the port at Governor’s Harbor where they will clean and hawk it from the boat ramp. The cutting table there is close enough to the road that passing drivers can slow, observe, ask questions (“What you got today?” “How fresh?”) And decide to stop and buy … or not.I watch them motor away up the coastline and then find them later in the day. ‘Aries’ tips a white plastic bucket filled with six-pound lobster to show off his catch. “It was a good day,” he says. When I ask if fishing is his passion, he admits not. “I like being on the water, I can dive to 100 feet, I’m not afraid of anything down there, even the tiger sharks, but to be honest when construction is good here … it’s good for the fish because lots of guys, including me, stop going out.”

A forty-five minute drive to the north delivers me to Gregory Town, where a now-dimming sun lights up the harbor. On either side of the bay, fishing boats have come in from twenty to thirty miles out to sea, stacked with fin fish – mostly grouper and jacks — and conch.

There are 9,000 fishermen throughout the 700 islands of the Bahamas; only a few hundred of them call Eleuthera home. The fishermen descaling a boat loaded with grouper are happy with the small number of locals who make a living off the sea. “When my grandfather was fishing,” says one, his head swarmed by flies as he rakes a sharp knife over a foot-long grouper, “this bay was loaded with fish. Now we have to go far out to sea for a good catch. But once we’re there, there’s plenty of fish.”

Despite such colloquial wisdom among the fishermen I meet up and down the length of Eleuthera – that there are plenty of fish out there — statistics, mostly collected by NOAA, suggest that’s not exactly the case.

NOAA says the lobsters, conch and all finfish in the region have been fished “to a dangerously low level.” Particularly concerning is drop offs in the number of snapper and grouper, which are already off limits along the Atlantic coast of the U.S., especially Florida.

One fish that’s long disappeared from these waters are the Atlantic bluefin tuna. “The only tuna we see now are black tuna,” one of the Gregory Town fishermen says. “And they’re only the size of a football, when they used to be several feet long.”

The biggest, most successful, thus wealthiest fishermen on Eleuthera live on an island off the northern tip, called Spanish Wells. With a population of 1,500, mostly white descendants of the British Puritan loyalists who first settled here in the 1780s, there are a couple hundred big boats based here.

Regarded as the lobster capitol of the Caribbean, it is one of the wealthiest settlements in the region. It is also a conservative, staunchly religious place, where visitors stick out. Guidebooks advise to expect “passive displays of hospitality.”

Many of the men, even into their seventies, still dive for fish, during a season that lasts from August through March. Most use condominiums, or traps, which help fulfill big contracts with Red Lobster and several big European chains.

The near waters surrounding Eleuthera are shallow, 75 feet at the deepest, and easy to navigate. According to the men of Spanish Wells the only hindrance to success these days is not a lack of fish, but poachers, from the Dominican Republic and Haiti, who sneak into the 45,000 square miles of Caribbean that is supposed to be for the Bahamians-only.
One group of fishermen in Eleuthera who don’t seem to have any complaint are the visiting bone fishermen who comes in droves to escape winter’s cold and whose silhouettes you spy throughout the day, fishing knee-deep in the salt water flats lining the Caribbean side of the island.

I stand with one, on an elevated cement wall lining the calm bay at Governor’s Harbor. Peering into the distance, he’s looking for signs of the big, opaque fish that love these shallows. He’s been coming here from New York to fish for forty years.

“There are probably a couple thousand of them within casting range,” he says. “Which never seems to change from year to year. I think because they’re mostly too smart to let us catch them.”

[flickr image via Thespis377]

Southern ocean police report

by Jon Bowermaster on

As Sea Shepherd predicted, when two of its boats made port in Hobart, Tasmania, over the weekend – on the heels of a just-completed and successful campaign against Japanese whalers – Australian police greeted them.

Armed with search warrants both the “Bob Barker” and “Steve Irwin” were scoured by the police with Sea Shepherd boss Paul Watson observing. No charges were made, nothing confiscated. Yet the search went on, spurred by complaints by the Japanese government that the Shepherd’s activities in the Southern Ocean were “obstructing commerce and industry.”

Japan Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara had asked New Zealand and the Netherlands, as well as Australia, to condemn the anti-whalers, since the Shepherd’s ships are registered in those countries. It claims the Shepherd’s put the lives of Japanese crewmen at risk.

Australia’s Green party leader, Sen. Bob Brown, was at the docks to welcome the Sea Shepherd activists and told the press: “The good police (of Australia) are doing the work of Tokyo…I have written to the Minister for Foreign Affairs this morning calling for an end to this charade.”

Watson said this was the third year in a row his ships have been searched when they’ve first made port. “All I can say to the Japanese who every year say ‘you guys are eco-terrorists, you’re criminals’ is ‘look, arrest me or shut up.’ It’s just getting really irritating constantly being called an eco-terrorist without actually being arrested.”

While the Japanese did quit the whaling season early, it’s no guarantee they are giving up, despite that the Shepherds’ formally announced that this past season’s “Operation No Compromise” is finished.They will most likely return to the Southern Ocean next year and in the meantime – since they took fewer than 100 whales this season, hardly the 900 they anticipated – it is possible they may turn to hunting whales closer to home, in the northwest of the Pacific Ocean.

For its part, Sea Shepherd says it will be back down south next season if necessary. “We will be prepared and we will be ready,” Watson said in a statement posted on his website. “Our objective is to defend the integrity of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. We have done so since 2002, and we will continue to do so if there are any future threats to the sanctuary and the whales.”

In more Antarctic-related police news, Norwegian skipper Jarle Andhoy, whose ship the “Berserk” sank off the coast on February 20 with three crewmembers onboard while he and another man attempted a misguided and secretive effort to reach the South Pole by ATV, has been charged back home with negligence.

The charges, recommended by Norway’s Polar Institute, cite his lack of a proper permit and for failing to have a search and rescue plan filed in advance in case of the very kind of emergency that sank his 42-foot sailboat.

Since the seventh continent is governed by international treaty – a unique agreement, thus there are no police or military there – citizens are subject to the rule of law in their home country.

Andhoy argues that Antarctica should be “free and open” to everyone, though he realizes he faces jail time for ignoring the rules. He may also have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to compensate the rescue efforts staged by the government of New Zealand and two private ships (including the Sea Shepherd’s “Steve Irwin,” whose helicopter logged 21 hours in the air searching for signs of the sunken boat).

IAATO, the organization that oversees all visits to Antarctica by private vessels, has condemned Andhoy and his unannounced effort to “sneak” to the South Pole without proper permit, thus endangering the crew left behind on the “Berserk” and rescuers.

Apparently Andhoy contacted several IAATO member ships prior to last season asking for support of his vague plan to reach the South Pole, which they all refused due to the fact he had neither asked for nor received permission.

No one who knows Antarctica is surprised the “Berserk” got in trouble. I’ve organized private expeditions to Antarctica and gone through the permitting process, which in the U.S. meant I had to file lengthy applications with the EPA, State Department and National Science Foundation.

I’ve sailed to the continent with veteran round-the-world sailor Skip Novak aboard his “Pelagic Australis,” and will do so again next January. He knows the conditions in the Ross Sea, where the ship was last heard from on February 20, as well as anyone and says he would never take a sailboat there, no matter the condition or season.

In an interview with Explorer’s Web, Skip said he’d been contacted by Andhoy last year and asked about making landings on the continent. “I get many of these ‘dreamers,’ who are largely ill informed of the basics of the geography and climate … I never heard from the guy again.”
Caught in a vicious though typical Antarctic storm – 80-knot winds, -10 degrees Celsius air temperatures, 25-30 foot seas — while the “Berserk” did manage to send out a distress signal, in all likelihood it sank very quickly, weighted down by ice and capsized.

This is the first time in modern history a private yacht has sunk off the coast of Antarctica.
“Every ship, aircraft, expedition and in some country’s cases, even individuals must apply for permission to enter Antarctic Treaty territory, defined by any movement south of 60 degrees,” says Skip.

“For the skipper of Berserk to be unaware of this is not believable. What has proved to be a maverick’s misadventure causing loss of life is symptomatic of a few ‘adventurists’ who still consider Antarctica an unregulated ‘wilderness’ area.

“The reality is that Antarctica via the Antarctic Treaty system collaborating with IAATO is a highly regulated territory, and it is unacceptable for anyone to claim they had no prior knowledge of the requirements proving due diligence.”

[flickr image via ]

Post-Gulf Spill: The more things change, the more slippery they get

by Jon Bowermaster on

A trio of news stories out of the Gulf remind that the more things change in the region — whether natural disaster (hurricanes), manmade screw up (oil rig explosions) or government intervention (drilling bans) — the more they stay the same.

Within weeks after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank nearly one year ago the Obama Administration banned all new deepwater drilling. The ban lasted until October 12. This week the Department of Interior announced it had approved its first new permit to drill deep in the Gulf of Mexico since the spill.

Noble Energy, a Houston-based operator, is the prizewinner, which the new Bureau of Ocean Energy, Regulation and Enforcement – the reorganized Minerals Management Service, the federal office that had cozied up to the oil industry for years — says it thoroughly vetted. Noble had begun drilling to 13,858 feet when it was halted by the spill.

The announcement was welcomed by the oil industry as its shares jumped on Wall Street. “We expect further deepwater permits to be approved in coming weeks and months based on the same process that led to the approval of this permit,” said the agency’s director Michael Bromwich.

For Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal the permit was a “good first step.” The first-term governor – who faces election this November — wants more permits granted faster. “We must quickly get to a level of issuing permits that represents a critical mass so thousands of oil and gas industry workers can get back to work fueling America again.”

It’s no surprise of course that’s Jindal’s take. As the Times pointed out this week he’s long been “cozy” with the oil industry, relationships complicated – or greased, dependent on your view — by a foundation set up by his wife the month after he was elected in 2007, the Supriva Jindal Foundation for Louisiana’s Children.

Among the biggest donors – all legal under Louisiana law – are Marathon Oil ($250,000), Israeli oil company Alon USA ($250,00), Dow Chemical ($100,000), Northrop Grumman, AT&T as well as other oil companies, insurers and construction companies.

While campaign donations are limited, donations to Mrs. Jindal’s Foundation are not.
What’s in it for the corporations, above and beyond supporting the foundation’s goal of delivering much-needed hi-tech equipment to schools in the poorest neighborhoods of Louisiana? AT&T hopes the governor will sign a law allowing it to sell cable TV rights without negotiating directly with individual parishes; Marathon was granted approval a year ago to expand the amount of oil it can refine at its Louisiana plant; Alon is seeking permit to dump more pollutants at its Krotz Spring refinery. And on and on.

Politicians using do-good foundations to (vaguely) mask corporate bribery is hardly a new tactic. PACs and political interest groups on both sides of the fence have been doing it for decades.
But in Louisiana, where corruption is a long-practiced fine art, the Jindals’ mutual interests aren’t masked at all. A picture of the governor with his wife graces the foundation’s website, his chief fundraiser is the charity’s treasurer and an employee of the governor’s office, working as an aide to Mrs. Jindal, is the contact for the foundation’s books.

While corporations continue to get their way in Louisiana, it appears many of those whose lives were impacted by last April’s oil spill will have to wait a bit longer for re-compensation.
Citing “lack of adequate documentation,” Ken Feinberg – appointed by Obama to dole out up to $20 billion of BP’s money to those whose livelihoods were affected by the spill – admitted that more than 100,000 claims currently on file might never be paid.

“Roughly 80 percent of the claims that we now have in the queue lack proof,” Feinberg said last week in Washington, admitting it was “a huge number.”

To-date his office has paid out nearly $3.6 billion, to 168,000 individuals and businesses across the Gulf, mostly emergency payments of a few thousand dollars.

Feinberg’s denials angered state governments in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, the White House … and a boatload of individuals in the region who’ve either already lost businesses or need money to jump start them. The states are appealing to the courts for redress, which means the lack of payments will certainly go on for months. Individuals are largely left holding the bag.

From its perspective, BP feels Feinberg has been “overly generous.” Any of the $20 billion not paid out goes back to BP. Meanwhile the oil company is paying Feinberg’s law firm $850,000 a month to administer the fund, which is currently being renegotiated – upwards. The lawyers are most likely happy to see the payment process drag on … and on.

[flickr photo via DVIDSHUB]

It’s time to end Indian Ocean “Adventures”

by Jon Bowermaster on

With news that seven Danish sailors, including three children aged 12 to 16, had been captured by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean on Thursday, February, 24, it’s time to reevaluate the legacy of four Americans shot to death by pirates in those same waters off eastern Africa just two days before the Danes issued their distress call.

In the obituaries of the four Americans killed aboard their sailing boat in the Indian Ocean this week each was praised for being “adventurous,” “great sailors,” having a “zest for life” and “passion for the high seas.” They were not “thrill seekers” and “knew the risks involved and accepted them.”

While not wanting to intrude on the mourning of their friends and relatives, having spent time in the Indian Ocean at the height of pirate season two years ago, watching cargo boats and tourist boats being wrapped in broken glass and razor wire and armed to the teeth with mercenary gun crews, all I could wonder when I first read the account of the “Quest” and its crew being taken hostage was … What were they thinking?Apparently headed for Djibouti, the four sailors knowingly sailed alone – rather than in a pack or “rally” of private yachts, which they had previously joined – into the most dangerous waters on the planet. Two hundred and seventy five miles off the coast of Oman they were caught and boarded by a mother ship carrying 17 pirates. Despite the arrival of a U.S. Navy ship, within 24 hours the four were shot dead.

With monsoon season over, the Indian Ocean is calm again, making this prime time for piracy. The four sailors aboard the “Quest” could not have missed the news that ships are being hijacked in that part of the ocean on a weekly basis. There are currently more than 800 hostages still being held, most crewmen of freighters and oil tankers. Private yachts are increasingly being attacked; a British couple was recently released after one year in captivity and a $1 million ransom paid, raised by friends back home.

Private boaters have been warned repeatedly by the world’s navies to stick to designated shipping lanes and to travel in groups. At any given time there are 30 warships patrolling the northern Indian Ocean – from the European Union, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, India and other nations – and still the pirates are thriving. Sponsored by mafia-like gangs onshore, the mother ships and attack boats are manned by the equivalent of street gangs: Impoverished young men with little hope, armed with increasingly sophisticated electronics, boats and weaponry.

Catching them and putting them on trial, whether in Nairobi or New York City, doesn’t seem to be slowing them down.

Which brings me back to why did these four think they could skirt danger when so many before had failed?

I am the first to encourage “an adventurous life.” But good adventuring includes knowing your limits and possessing some kind of personal radar to help recognize the boundaries between adventure seeking and foolhardiness. That the “Quest” was heavily loaded with tons of Bibles, which the retired couple who owned and sailed the ship had been distributing at stops around the world during the past six years, was not enough to save them from an “adventure” gone very, very bad.

One of the four passengers was quoted as saying, “If anything happens to us on these travels, just know that we died living our dream.”

Really? That’s your dream? To sail into the most dangerous waters on the planet, be kidnapped by a gang of thug pirates and shot to the death in the galley of your sailboat? In retrospect, of course, the dream sounds far more like a nightmare.

[flickr image via Gui Seiz]