From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/18/sea-shepherd-defend-southern-ocean-whale
Our Antarctic campaign has become stronger and more efficient – but the Japanese whalers are getting recklessly aggressive
Paul Watson
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 February 2013
I don’t think that there is a more isolated, more remote, or more forbidding place on this planet than where we find ourselves at this moment.
Draw a line due south from Sri Lanka for 4,404 nautical miles and it will bring you to Prdyz Bay, deep in the Cooperation Sea, close to the massive Amory ice shelf.
Some 2,632 nautical miles to the north-east is Perth, Western Australia and 2,632 miles to the north-west is Cape Town, South Africa.
In contrast, we are only 1,380 miles to the south pole.
It is summertime in Antarctica and outside on the deck, the wind is blowing at 30 knots and the temperature has dropped to -10C.
On our port beam at a quarter of a kilometre, and just barely discernible through the misty swirling snow is the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker. I can see her taking white water over her bow and hoar frost clinging like bleached algae on her blue, grey, and black mottled hull.
Ahead of us another quarter of a kilometre, a massive black hull plunges and bucks in a frothing sea. And as if the sea spray was not enough, the ship fires six high-powered streams of sea water in different directions. Briny icicles hang from her rails.
I can see the stern slipway, that awful maw that literally swallows whales whole, wasting nothing, they say, except for the whales themselves.
The beautiful creatures get dragged onto the flensing deck to be mutilated and cut into pieces, to be frozen and boxed below deck as streams of steaming blood pour into the sea from the scuppers.
The Sea Shepherd Crew call that floating mechanised abattoir the cetacean Death Star. It is the Japanese whale-processing factory ship the Nisshin Maru, and for nine long years we have hunted her down in these waters with the single objective of interfering with her primary activity – the slaughtering of whales.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/18/sea-shepherd-defend-southern-ocean-whale
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