Looking for the whaling ship Nisshin Maru

On 22 November 2005, the Rainbow Warrior sailed into Cape Town harbour with the New Zealand flag cracking in a fresh breeze. Her bow was adorned with the bright rainbow and doves of peace. Above the bridge windows hung a black banner with white lettering that read ‘Nuclear Free Pacific’. Captain Pete Bouquet and I were on the bridge; my first trip on the Warrior but for Pete it was a trip down memory lane.

Back in 1977 the 418-tonne trawler Sir William Hardy had been found for sale on the Isle of Dogs on the opposite side of the river Thames from Greenwich. This 44 metre long vessel had been built in the U.K. in 1955 and then converted to serve as a research vessel. The WWF in Netherlands came up with funding to assist Greenpeace U.K. with the purchase and Pete Bouquet answered the call for volunteers to come down to the dock and help with her transformation into the Rainbow Warrior. Within the Greenpeace archives there is an iconic picture of Pete in a boatswain’s chair hanging off the bow and painting in the white doves of peace nearly thirty years ago.

Eight years later the flag ship, newly converted to carry sails, was bombed by the French secret service whilst alongside in Auckland harbour, New Zealand. Not one but two bombs placed by French divers on the hull brought the peace doves below the water level and lifted the life of photographer Fernando Pereira into the clouds.

In a re-take of history, Pete and I where sailing the old Warrior before the bomb, into the set of a French film production. The fishing vessel, Southern Saint, built in the same year as the Sir William Hardy had been chartered and dressed for the occasion and even the small tug assisting with our mooring had swapped her South African ensign for that of New Zealand. Cameras captured the historical moment from every angle as we drew up to the dock of a Popeye village scene with fishing nets draped over wooden cases and casks stowed one upon another, a set-back of twenty years.

The decks became a bustle of activity with the extras from the movie industry wearing brightly patched bell-bottoms and woolly sweaters moving too and fro between coils of rope and checking knots again and again providing activity for the rolling cameras. Pete and I surveyed the scene from behind the bridge windows. We keep our hair short, wear plain clothes and clearly did not fit into this Greenpeace scene.

Meanwhile back in the real world the Greenpeace flag ship, Rainbow Warrior, the one that replaced the original now resting at the bottom of the sea on the coast of New Zealand, is crossing the South China seas on her way from the Philippines to Thailand. On the same side of the Planet but further south there is a fleet of death dark ships making their way from Japan to the Southern Ocean. They are going to hunt down a thousand whales in the Whale Sanctuary. Somewhere between Africa and Australia, the two largest Greenpeace ships are on their way to intercept the Japanese; they are making good progress and are nearly a week out of Cape Town. Reading from the web log posted under The Expedition on www.oceans.greenpeace.org the crew on board the Esperanza and Arctic Sunrise are being thrown about by the mountainous swells of the Roaring Forties on their way to hunt the hunters.

The law of 6 degrees of separation means that you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows precisely where the whaling fleet will be in the next few months. Perhaps you know someone who works in maritime tracking, satellite imagery, the Japanese fishing industry, cetacean research, who’s doing an ocean crossing in the Pacific or in ship brokering and looking to supply the whaling fleet with bunkers, or in some other field that might have first hand knowledge of where the fleet will be.

The ship we are seeking is named the Nisshin Maru, gross tonnage 8,030, length 130 metres, radio call sign JJCJ. She is the factory ship and will be accompanied by three catchers, Kyo Maru No. 1 with radio call sign JKNG, the Yushin Maru call sign JLZS and Yushin Maru No. 2, call sign JPPV. These ships left Shimonoseki, Southern Japan at 10am local time on the 8th of November. If you have any leads then send the information to: hunt-the-hunters (AT) greenpeace (Dot) org all information will be treated in strictest confidence.

I have reason to believe that a South African broker in Cape Town is working to supply the Japanese fleet with bunkers. This does not mean that the supply carrier will come from Cape Town but the logistics may be managed from here. Who could this be?