Voice from the Deep!

David Jonas, a New Hampshire resident, described the tense confrontation to The Canadian Press early Sunday after he was released from custody in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

He said an RCMP tactical squad boarded the ship at 11 a.m. ADT Saturday while the Farley Mowat’s crew members were observing the annual seal hunt in the Cabot Strait - the body of water between Cape Breton and Newfoundland. 

Google Earth link to the locations involved

“We were placed under arrest, forced to lie down on the deck,” said Jonas, a member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. “We were then escorted to the stern of the ship and kept under armed guard.”

Jonas said some of his shipmates were handcuffed once aboard the coast guard icebreaker Des Groseilliers, which brought them to port in Sydney late Saturday night.

Jonas said the Mowat’s 17 crew members were told they would be charged with violating Canada’s sealing laws.

However, once on shore, they were told the charges would be dropped against all but the captain and chief officer, who both made a brief appearance early Sunday in a Sydney courtroom.

Jonas said Canada has no legal grounds to detain them.

“Canada did not have a right to board us and bring us to Sydney. We were in international waters. We’re a Dutch-registered vessel and had the right of free passage.”

Federal Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn has insisted the Farley Mowat was seized legally in Canada’s “internal waters.”

The Farley Mowat’s crew maintains their vessel never entered Canada’s 12-nautical-mile territorial limit, but Hearn said the Fisheries Act gave him the authority to take action beyond that line.

In Sydney, several members of the Mowat’s crew were detained Sunday after they refused to comply with immigration and customs checks, Jonas said. They refused the sign the immegration forms.

“Half of us have denied that opportunity, and will be interned,” he said. “It’s clearly an unusual circumstance for all involved.”

Until they’re released, the crew is going on a hunger strike, Jonas added.

The Farley Mowat will be detained in Sydney for as long at it takes Transport Canada officials to conduct a full inspection, Hearn said. No doubt they will drag their feet about it and delay it as long as possible.

Sea shepherd had the last laugh…

It took the U.S.-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society a little while to arrange the $10,000 bail for the Two officers of an anti-sealing vessel arrested over the weekend.

You see, they decided to pay the ransom in Dubloonies. (2 Dollar coins)

“We have bail. We just came from the bank … We intend to give them $5,000 in coins, toonies,” said crew member Shannon Mann. “They called us pirates all the time so we thought it would be funny.”

Yes it is.. lol

I wonder if the RCMP will delete the video and images stored on the computer/laptops onboard ?

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At 0700 Hours (PST) and 1100 Hours Atlantic time the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel Farley Mowat was attacked by officers from two Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers the Des Groseilliers and the Sir Wifred Grenfell.

An armed boarding party took control of the Dutch registered vessel in international waters in the Gulf of St. Lawrence well beyond the Canadian twelve mile territorial limit.

Violence and intimidation both on and off the ice

Captain Paul Watson was speaking by phone with Farley Mowat communications officer Shannon Mann when he heard the voices of men screaming for the crew to fall to the floor. The men carried guns according to Mann and could be heard by Captain Watson threatening the Farley Mowat’s crew. As Captain Watson was speaking with Shannon Mann, the Satellite phone went dead and nothing more has been heard from the Sea Shepherd crew.

Canada’s federal Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn issued a statement on Saturday saying the government was acting in the best interests of the sealers.

A spokeswoman from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) said three Australians were believed to be on board.

“We’re seeking to confirm the safety and welfare of three Australians allegedly on board the Sea Shepherd’s Dutch vessel Farley Mowat which is currently on its way to Nova Scotia,” she said.

The Candian fishermen sell seal pelts mostly to the fashion industry in Norway, Russia and China, as well as blubber for oil. The United States has banned Canadian seal products since 1972. The EU is soon to follow in banning of seal products.

US Humane Society video 

Cruelty documented on the ice

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On the coral atoll of Midway in the central Pacific - famous for America’s first victory over the Japanese fleet in World War Two - wildlife experts are facing a new battle against a rising tide of plastic waste.  

Link to video

Worldwatch.org says: “Factories around the world churned out roughly four trillion plastic bags in 2002.”

Most end up in landfill, taking between 15 and 1,000 years to degrade, or circulating in the environment, killing thousands of animals and causing floods through the clogging of drains.

In 2005, the western Indian state of Maharashtra banned the manufacture, sale and use of all plastic bags, saying they choked drainage systems during monsoon rains. The move came after flooding and landslides killed more than 1,000 people that summer.

A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”

According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,

Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. “What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It’s that simple,” said Dr Eriksen.

The solution is a hard one…  use less plastic. Not just plastic bags, they make little difference to the plastic crap that is floating around onthe worlds oceans.

Plastic bags are not the problem - It’s all the other types of plastic that we use. From plastic toys to syringes to toothbrushes, crates, buckets.. you name it and it can be found floating around in the ocean!

They should all be made of bio-degradable plastics or recycled/shredded for use in other plastic items or for road aggregate etc.

Just think twice before purchasing a plastic item that could end up in the world’s largest garbage dump.

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In a few days time the Canadian seal hunt will begin. And the this time the Canadians are attempting to be more “humane”.

Canada, as if to slap the Europeans in the face for threatening to ban seal products, has set this year’s kill quota at 325,000 seals.

It’s hard to believe that this is the 21st Century, when a government of a wealthy nation like Canada continues to promote and encourage the largest and most sadistic marine wildlife massacre on the planet.

Warning - Graphic Images

Warning - Graphic Images

Canada, as if to slap the Europeans in the face for threatening to ban seal products, has set this year’s kill quota at 325,000 seals.

It’s hard to believe that this is the 21st Century, when a government of a wealthy nation like Canada continues to promote and encourage the largest and most sadistic marine wildlife massacre on the planet.

Canadian Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn set the high quota without any scientific justification and without any market justification. The Canadian taxpayers will continue to foot the bill to send uneducated sadistic killers onto the ice with spiked clubs to bash in the skulls of seal pups. It is nothing more than a glorified welfare scheme to give East coast fishermen enough work to justify their unemployment insurance payments.

Captain Paul Watson (SSCS):

In announcing the new quota Hearn said that the seal slaughter has been improved with new rules to make the hunt more “humane”.

The new rules call for the sealers to sever the arteries of seals under their flippers after they have been shot or clubbed.

It’s “bash and slash” now instead of just “bash” and that is considered to be an improvement.

To say that this makes the seal slaughter more humane is to say that a psychopath is a better person if he slashes the throat of his victim after bashing in his or her skull.

The new rules are being imposed in an attempt to convince the European Parliament to not ban seal products into Europe. Canada is spending a small fortune in sending delegations to Europe to plea for the right to continue to massacre seal pups.

As a Canadian I am hopeful that the European Parliament will act soon to ban all seal products. All of my life I have been sickened and disgusted by this annual ritual of death where grown men kick seal pups in the face, bash in their skulls, skin them alive and stain the ice floes red with the blood of hundreds of thousands of seal pups, turning the nursery floes of these gentle creatures into a living hell of spewing blood and gore amidst the pitiful screams of dying and injured young animals.

There is no other place on Earth where the arrogance of humankind can be seen in all of its primitive and ignorant glory than on the ice floes under assault by blood-stained men with hearts as hard and merciless as iron.

We have no choice but to challenge them and to do whatever we can to disrupt their vicious rape of the seal nurseries.

As always it will be difficult. The sealers are protected by the Seal Protection Regulations that make it a Federal offense to witness or document a seal pup being killed. In Canada if you see a sealer club a seal pup and you don’t have a permit to witness the slaughter you can be arrested, jailed and fined up to $100,000 or sent to jail for a year.

It’s hard to believe, but Canada is a nation where killing is a subsidized recreational activity and compassion is severely punished.

We need to demonstrate to the European Parliament just how brutal the Canadian seal hunt is by again going into the ice packs ourselves and placing our lives on the line in defense of the seals.

It is important that we make this issue as hot as possible before the Europeans vote by demonstrating that people of compassion are willing to risks their lives and freedom to abolish this atrocity.

So it’s out of the Southern deep freeze and into the Northern freezer, from saving whales to saving seals - the work of a shepherd of the sea is never done.

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