To return to the surface click on the icon...

M.V. Arctic Sunrise

Crew Update 6th April

Bright sunshine - finally! For several days the weather can only be described as foul: a fierce North-Westerly whose only aim appeared to be to drive us all the way down to Antarctica has battered us, but aside from a pile of broken crockery and the stains of countless spilt coffees in the alleyways, we seem to have survived. The clean up crews collect in the mess and report their mutual satisfaction with the job over bowls of steaming pumpkin soup.

The Southern Ocean can be an unforgiving place, and even though we are not very deep into it just a few hundred miles South of the South Island of New Zealand we have had a brisk lesson in respect for her. So what on earth are we doing here? - a question asked more than once over the last few days!

We are hunting for big game hunters, and the game they hunt for is one of the largest and most precious fish remaining on the planet. And indeed, sad to say, remaining is the most descriptive word; for these fish, the giant Southern Blue Fin Tuna, once fished by the tens of thousands of tonnes each year, is now listed as an endangered species. And too, would you be surprised to hear that fishing boats are still coming half way across the planet to catch them? Well, saying as we have managed to exterminate most of the earth's large land creatures, why not do the same to the sea?

The hunters we search for are not hard-bitten souls in small wooden boats battling the elements so as to put a feed on the family table, but Hi-Tech steel warships, bristling with the latest electronics, the front line of an operation that involves the latest in refrigeration technology and the air-freighting of the catch to a hungry Sashimi market in Japan, where the top dollar prices paid obviously more than match the cost of raising such a big operation. Some of the boats we seek have come all the way from Japan for a slice of a total allowable catch this year of around 450 tonnes in NZ waters.

So that is why we find ourselves searching the horizon of a settling sea, seeking for signs of the victors in this uneven war against one of the last stocks of yet another dying race. But we must to work: flush the salt from every crevice of the helicopter (affectionately known as Tweety); breath life into outboard engines and jolt them from their damp hibernation of the last week; clean the fuel filters in the main engine as the bucking and rolling has stirred every last speck of dirt in the fuel tanks; and scrape the salt off the bridge windows so that we can see what we are looking at! Now the sun is sliding toward the waves; maybe tomorrow we will find them.