Thursday, January 27, 2011

Gotcha!

After a 26-day pursuit over 4,000 miles, Steve Irwin has caught the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru!
From now on, Sea Shepherd will - as Capt.Paul Watson so eloquently put it - “ride their ass" until the end of the whaling season.
Having cut off oil supplies to NM by herding away the supply ship Sun Laurel, all SS has to do now to block the whalers from reaching their mother ship. For 23 days of tailing, two of those vessels have not taken a single whale. The Yushin Maru 1 accompanying the factory ship did manage some kills: there was a whale being butchered on-deck when SS caught them.
Nisshin Maru trying to outrun Steve Irwin by going through heavy ice
In terms of vessel disposition, the interceptor Gojira is heading to Tasmania for some quick repairs on a fuel pump, but it'll be back before Steve Irwin needs to leave to refuel. Bob Barker has enough fuel to stay with the nasty Nippons well into March, by which time SI will return with fuel reserves to extend SS’s intervention until the end of the whaling season. The Korean-owned SL is heading east and is now closer to Chile than New Zealand. SI is hard on NM's tail, with BB about to join it: the fleet is cornered in a Ross Sea ice bay and is fleeing eastward into thick ice.
The proof of Operation No Compromise's success will be when the fleet announces its final kill count in April. Those figures will definitely be much lower than previous seasons - you'll recall how the fleet returned to port in 2010 in total humiliation. "Losing face" is very degrading to Japanese but, while the whalers worry about their own pride, their actions cause their homeland to be humiliated globally.
They'd better get used to it: this 2010/2011 whaling season will be a financial disaster!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I had a good laugh seeing your headline "Gotcha!"
That was the very same headline used by UK paper The Sun in 1982, when a British submarine 'HMS Conqueror' sank the Argentine ship 'General Belgrano' off the Falklands.
That banner is still as applicable today as it was then.