Greenpeace tries to block Japanese whalers

Japanese whalers used water cannons to drive off Greenpeace protesters today as the environmental activists battled to prevent a Japanese ship from loading a harpooned whale in the Southern Ocean.

Speaking from the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise off the Antarctic coast, expedition leader Shane Rattenbury said the Sunrise and sister ship Esperanza had tracked down the Japanese whaling vessel Nisshin Maru.

“This morning we witnessed a whale being harpooned ... we positioned our two ships to the stern of the Japanese mother ship in order to prevent the whale being transferred on to the ship and we were successful in stopping that process for about 45 minutes,” Rattenbury said.

The Japanese boat fought back with water cannon, he said, with one of the Greenpeace inflatables capsizing in the wash of the whaler.

One of the smaller Japanese whale capture boats then rammed one of the Greenpeace ships to try and push it clear of the whale loading process.