The crew of the Yushin-maru pull a harpooned whale to the ship's port side.

On-Board the M/V Arctic Sunrise

Day Sixty-four - 11 January 2000

"Six and a Half Minutes"

We were only a few dozen yards away from the Yushin-maru which was busy hauling in its latest kill. The seas were too rough to launch inflatables so we had to stand on deck and watch helplessly as the harpooned minke whale thrashed against the ropes hauling it to the whaling ship. The creature twisted in pain for at least six minutes and thirty seconds before it finally stopped moving - dead.

"Well an emotional experience, really," was all Australian radio operator Colin Russell could say when asked about watching the killing. "Everybody on deck was saying 'they (the whalers) can't be proud of the job they do'. They were just standing on the deck watching this 'thing' thrash about in such obvious agony."

The Japanese government, in defiance of international law, subsidizes this hunt in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary under the guise of scientific research.

But as onboard campaigner John Bowler points out, "no legitimate research project would allow this kind of suffering. Even lab rats are treated more humanely."

On the deck of the factory ship Nisshin-maru, a Japanese crew member holds a sign that reads, "We're collecting tissue samples." The fleet will return to port with almost 2,000 tons of whale meat which will then be sold on the commercial market.

Also, no legitimate scientific organization would carry on with lethal research outside the bounds of international law or ignore pleas from the appropriate international body to halt its activity.

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) has said that the information gained under this psuedo-scientific research program is "not required" for the management of whales and each year since the whale hunt began the IWC has called on Japan to halt its activities.

But Japan's whaling fleet is not a scientific venture. It is a commercial one. Ethical and legal concerns take a back seat to the pursuit of money and every year the Japanese fleet returns to port with roughly 2,000 tons of whale meat worth millions of dollars.

The crew of the Yushin-maru tie the whale to the side of the ship. They will eventually transfer the whale to the Nisshin-maru for butchering.

We sent the helicopter up with our camera crews as soon as we could to confront the whalers. When the whalers saw the helicopter they stopped. Perhaps they felt they had caught enough for the day and could knock off early. Or maybe they stopped because they realized that footage documenting their gruesome hunt would undercut their claims of noble scientific inquiry.

They stopped too late however. While we could only stand as witnesses while the crew of the Yushin-maru killed ten whales we did manage, for the first time in a decade, to document the harsh realities of Japan's illegal whaling program in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary.