Report from Captain Watson - march 30th

[hop 0]

The Sea Shepherds Happily Ride Out the Storm

A Gale is Raging, Sealing Vessels are Sinking and the Seals are Safe for Today at Least

Report from Captain Paul Watson

March 30th, 2005

2000 Hours Atlantic Standard Time
1600 Hours Pacific Standard Time

Position: 47 Degrees 03 Minutes 967 Seconds North
61 Degrees 35 Minutes 217 Seconds West

13 Miles South of the Magdalen Islands


The Farley Mowat is in the middle of a hellish raging early spring storm, but we're not complaining. This weather has been an incredible salvation to the harp seal pups. Relatively few were slaughtered today. Yesterday, more than 15,000 seals were killed.

The Farley Mowat has been pushed seven miles to the south since Noon. We are locked into the ice and so are most of the sealing ships.

But whereas the Farley Mowat, a strong North Sea Norwegian built trawler is sitting as snug as bug in a rug, the sealing vessels are getting an ass kicking from the gale.

The sealing vessel Sandy Beach has been abandoned and is drifting some 30 miles north of the Magdalen Islands. Her crew were airlifted by a Coast Guard helicopter.

The sealing vessel Yankee Point has been abandoned and is listing heavily in the ice and will most likely sink. The crew were rescued by another sealing vessel the Cooper Island. The Cooper Island is now listing heavily and has forty sealers on board. The ice breaker Earl Grey is en route to rescue them.

The sealing vessel Horizon I was under tow by the Coast Guard ship Amundsen when the tow line broke and the vessel has been reported abandoned although this is not confirmed.

The sealing vessel Jean Mathieu has issued a call for help. There were two unknown Mayday Distress signals issued from unidentified sealing vessels. Some sealing vessels have reported having their bridge windows blown in and their electronics damaged.

The three Canadian Coast Guard Ice-breakers in the Gulf, the Edward Cornwallis, the Amundsen and the Earl Grey have been running rescue missions to assist distressed sealing vessels all day. Some of the sealers have managed to scurry back to the safety of the harbour at Cap aux Meule in the Magdalen Islands. The Coast Guard have indicated that many of their crew are exhausted but the calls keep coming in.

The Canadian Government has irresponsibly opened up this seal slaughter to every greedy fishermen with a boat. Few of these vessels have any business being in the ice and cannot navigate the thick floes without assistance from the Coast Guard. Thus we have a hundred or so sealing vessels in treacherous ice conditions in a raging gale and the Canadian Coast Guard is not prepared to assist them all. To make matters worse, two of the ice breakers spent hours shadowing the Farley Mowat to ensure that we did not take any photographs of the seal killing.

Late in the afternoon, an officer with the Quebec Provincial Police telephoned me to say that we needed a permit to approach a half a nautical mile to a sealer. I answered that we had all applied for the permits but the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) would only issue the permits in the Magdalen Islands, the one place that the crew of the Farley Mowat could not safely go. The officer said he understood and said that the QPP had the authority within twelve miles of the Magdalens and that we had permission to approach within a half a nautical miles of a sealer on the condition that the crew would not leave the vessel. The problem is that I requested that this permission be given in writing or by e-mail and so far I have not received any such permission.

And so we await tomorrow with hopes that the storm will not abate and that Mother Nature's fury will intensify and bring misery and misfortune to all those who have so ruthlessly delivered cruelty and death to so many seals. When I hear the howl of the winds through our rigging and I feel the shiver of the wind's force vibrating through the ship's hull, I am hearing the Banshee screaming of an enraged spirit of nature. The freezing rain is washing the blood of yesterday's carnage from the ice leaving the haunting wretched and skinned bodies of fifteen thousand innocent creatures staring vacantly towards the dark hovering clouds overhead.

We are all under those black clouds this evening - seals, sealers, seal defenders and government sealer protectors. The seals are safe within the furies and we are comfortable. The Coast Guard are busy rescuing their beloved seal killers and the sealers are gloriously miserable and we are happy for that - they don't have our sympathies for we saw what they did and we witnessed their insensitivity, their viciousness and their greed and their sadistic delight in killing and destroying such beautiful and innocent beings.

So bring it on Mother Nature - intensify the winds, throw the freezing rain in our faces, put enough pressure on the ice to crack and fracture every sealer's hull and bury them under the dark shroud of the sea in just retribution for the evil they unleashed on the ice yesterday.

The unspeakable horror of their deeds must be punished, if not by Canada then by Nature.

And there is a religious element to this. The baby seal was used by the legendary Labrador missionary Sir Wilfred Grenfell to convey the idea of the lamb of God to the Inuit. The baby harp seal was the ideal replacement for an animal that the Inuit had never seen. They knew what Grenfell was referring to because the beauty and the innocence of the seal pup speaks for itself. The Inuit word for the baby seal is kotik and that is the same word they use for the Lamb of God.

Yesterday, the sealers made the floes run red with torrents of blood from the Lamb of God. And tonight they lament about the storm and some are seeing their ill-gotten profits sink to the bottom of the sea. Mother Mary and Mother Gaia are both crying this night.

[Animal 0]

Aux nouvelles d'hier soir sur un poste anglais, on a pu voir un bref apperçu du déroulement de cette chasse... On voyait un chasseur donner de grands coups de hakapiks à une maman phoque, puis ensuite, on a vu le chasseur partir, avec sous son bras, la maman phoque qui n'avait plus de peau sur le corps mais qui bougeait encore, puis sur la glace, juste à côté, son petit blanchon dans une mare de sang qui regardait tout ça... Ça m'a empêché de dormir toute la nuit ! Quelle barbarie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[animo-aequoanimo 0]

Affreux! Mais as-tu rmarqué que contrairement à l'an dernier la télé et les journaux du Québec parlent pas mal de ce carnage? L'an dernier c'était le silence presque total. J'avais expédié une couple de lettres à ce sujet à nos médias mais elles étaient restées non publiées et sans réponse.

[Animal 0]

C'est vrai qu'on en parle + cette année... J'avais écrit aussi à plusieurs journalistes francophones pour leur demander pourquoi ils étaient si silencieux, alors que tous les journaux anglophones couvraient cette chasse... Nos lettres y sont peut-être pour quelque chose :

[catou1111 0]

Je pense que la forte pression internationale initiée cette année contre cette "chasse", a dû jouer un rôle déterminant pour faire enfin réagir les médias québécois francophones.

Ce doit être terrible d'assister à ce massacre sans pouvoir rien faire pour l'empêcher... dans l'immédiat.

Moi non plus je n'aurais pas dormi de la nuit si j'avais regardé les images télévisées que tu as vues Do.

Faute d'un miracle, d'une intervention "divine", bref, d'une conversion de la conscience humaine, on en vient vraiment à souhaiter l'extinction de notre propre espèce...

Je crains que c'est trop attendre des humains que d'attendre qu'ils soient respectueux de la vie en général. En effet, lorsqu'ils le sont, ils ne le sont généralement que partiellement, excluant et réifiant pour des raisons fallacieuses - qui accomodent leur conscience - des sujets vivants.

Bonne journée malgré tout,

Catou

[hop 0]

While the seal hunt in Canada is going on, we have decided to include Seal Hunt updates for you on the Stop The Killing list along with the normal Action Alerts regarding our own local holocaust here in LA of over fifty thousand healthy, treatable cats, dogs, puppies, kittens, rabbits and wildlife executed every single year in LA's six city animal Death Camps.
Visit www.StopTheKilling.net
If you are not on the new STOP THE KILLING list, then sign up by clicking on http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/stopthekilling

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Report from the Farley Mowat

March 31st, 2005
0930 Hours A.S.T. 0530 P.S.T.

Position: 46 Degrees 47 Minutes 976 Seconds North
61 Degrees 44 Minutes 484 Seconds West

25 Miles South of the Magdalens
30 Miles Northwest of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia

A Truly Wonderful Perfect Storm

It is the last day of March and the wind is roaring like a lion, the ice pressure continues to build, visibility is severely limited, the temperature continues to drop and the crew of the Farley Mowat are very contented.

We love this storm and the havoc it is causing to the sealing fleet. The entire armada of sealing vessels, a fleet that numbered close to one hundred on Monday is now scattered, shattered and scurrying to the closest port.

"It's not worth it b'ye, these seals ain't worth this!" One sealer was overheard saying to another on the radio.

The Canadian Coast Guard has been working through the night rescuing one sealing vessel after another.

The crew of the Farley Mowat are sitting in the middle of this panic circus, enjoying every minute of this storm.

"This is the perfect storm," said First Cook Jonny Vasic. "This is the second day made safe for the seals from the barbarians on those vessels. The seals seem happy and I'm happy for them."

It is of course incredible that these vessels were allowed to come out into these elements. The boats used by the sealers are all within the fifty to seventy foot range and their hulls were not built to withstand such ice pressure. The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans in their lust to have the seals killed have placed these vessels and their crew in dire peril. It appears that anyone with a boat was given a license and permission to go out and slaughter seals.

"This is the same government that wanted us to cross every t and dot every i on every certificate and accused us of not having a proper ship and crew to go to the ice." Said Captain Paul Watson. "Yet here we are safe and seaworthy as the entire sealing fleet lies in disarray around us. If they were really concerned about safety and not harassing us, the bureaucrats would have been more careful about what types of vessels they authorized to go to this free-for-all-slaughter on the ice."

As the sealers scramble to return to port, the crew of the Farley Mowat are filming seals and sending dive crews under the ice to film the seals beneath the surface.

"I love this place," said Laura Dakin from Bermuda, "the seals are beautiful, this storm is incredibly welcome because it put a stop to the cruelty and the killing. I'm so glad we are here. I'm enjoying this immensely."

The wind and moving ice is pushing the Farley Mowat and many of the sealers away from the Magdalens towards the coast of Cape Breton Island.

Hopefully no seals will be killed today.

[catou1111 0]

Je suis allée vérifier la météo pour les Iles-de-la-Madeleine... à partir de demain il fera beau...

S'il pouvait y avoir du sabotage de ces bateaux de malheur, peut-être que plusieurs se détourneraient de ces criminels desseins, et que cela mettrait en déroute tous ces sadiques. Je rêve bien sûr.

Je suis heureuse qu'on n'ait pu martyriser les phoques aujourd'hui, mais je voudrais tant que cela soit plus qu'un sursis pour eux...

[Animal 0]

Citation :

Je pense que la forte pression internationale initiée cette année contre cette "chasse", a dû jouer un rôle déterminant pour faire enfin réagir les médias québécois francophones.

Je le pense aussi Catou mais je ne trouve pas ça normal non plus qu'il faille toujours attendre que les pressions viennent d'ailleurs - Ça a été pareil pour les animaux torturés dans les encans du Québec, ou pour le transport des animaux de "boucherie" du Québec. Il a fallu que ça soit des assos européennes qui viennent ici pour dénoncer ce qui s'y passait... Même chose pour la chasse aux phoques.. C'est Bardot qui est venue au Canada et qui l'a dénoncée... Il y a quelques années, une riche touriste américaine en visite au Québec, avait elle aussi dénoncé la façon dont les animaux de notre province étaient traités...

Citation :

Faute d'un miracle, d'une intervention "divine", bref, d'une conversion de la conscience humaine, on en vient vraiment à souhaiter l'extinction de notre propre espèce...

Tu l'as dit Catou !!!!!!!!


Bonne fin de soirée malgré tout Catou

(Merci pour cette adresse buteo... www.StopTheKilling.net J'irai les visiter ce soir ou demain)

[Animal 0]

Je viens d'apprendre il y a quelques minutes que des membres de l'équipage du Seals Shepherd ont été tabassés et que d'autres ont été emprisonnés... Je vous reviens avec cette nouvelle un peu plus tard