Reply #121: UPDATE: Sea Shepherd Gives the Whalers a Gift that Keeps on Stinking

[Barrett808]

Sea Shepherd Gives the Whalers a Gift that Keeps on Stinking
By Captain Paul Watson on board the Steve Irwin

The day after Christmas started out very disappointedly. The Japanese whaling fleet had to be close by but the dense fog would not let up and the helicopter could not fly. There was thick ice to the South and growlers lying in wait all around us, threatening to ambush us in that ghostly whitish mist.

I decided to just shut down the engines and wait until we could launch the helicopter to monitor the fleet. All day that blasted fog hung around us like a Chinese funeral shroud as the ship rolled gently on the slight swells. Just after dinner, I received a call from the bridge to the mess asking for my presence topside.

There was a ship on the radar moving slowly only a few miles away. Peter Brown's watch had been tracking it. It was indeed a ship and its erratic movements and being where we were, we knew it was one of the ship's from the Japanese fleet. But which one?

We knew they had not seen us. To them, we were just an iceberg in the fog.

I ordered both engines to be started and the boat crews to prepare both the Gemini and the Delta. As we waited for the engines to be prepared for starting, the ship moved within two miles of us. The boats were being prepared when Bosun Dan Bebawi informed me that the radar in the Gemini was not working. I was a little annoyed that this had not been brought to my attention earlier. I had no choice but to abort the launching of the small boats. I could not send a crew out in a small boat in this fog without radar.

We would have to go after them with the ship. They were now three miles away.

With both engines started we got underway and I took the wheel to navigate the vessel around the hundreds of growlers between us and the target. Every one of those chunks of deadly hard ice could be our undoing. They may as well have been mines. It was tricky maneuvering through that maze of ice at top speed but we were gaining on them and we could tell by their erratic course and fluctuating speed that they were cautiously working their way through ice ahead of us. The gap slowly closed. With less than a mile to go, they had to see us on their radar by now. Mal Holland kept me updated with their range and speed. 1st Officer Peter Brown kept his hands on the controls to react quickly if we needed to stop or slow down. Jane Taylor tracked the pursuit on the nautical chart and monitored the 2nd radar.

Up on the bow, some of the crew were peering ahead through the milky soup to get a first glance at the mystery ship. By now I had determined it was not the Nisshin Maru. A ship the size of the factory vessel would not be steering such a zig zag course through this ice. It was either a harpoon boat or a spotter vessel. Slowly we inched out way closer coming dangerously near to bobbing bluish white growlers on the surface.

And then in front of us the white hull slowly materialized in the mist. Damn, it was one of the two spotters - the Kaiko Maru, the very same ship we had stopped and collided with back in 2006 in the Ross Sea.

There was not a soul on the decks. Just one man on the flying bridge staring straight ahead. We were alongside and half a length of the ship away when he turned and saw us. We were close enough to see his eyes widen as he stumbled out of his chair and scrambled below to the wheelhouse. We must have been a terrifying sight. A sleek black raider suddenly appearing out of nowhere, framed in fog and both ships running full out through a minefield of growlers.

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