AP News, February 17th, 2007
A Japanese whaling ship stranded in Antarctic waters was on an even keel Saturday after pumps cleared water used to douse the fire that crippled it, a government official said.
Meanwhile, the body of a 27-year-old crewman lost in the blaze aboard the 8,000-ton Nisshin Maru on Thursday has been found, an official said Saturday as the crew continued to refuse a Greenpeace offer to tow the stricken factory ship from the ice-strewn Southern Ocean.
Kazutaka Makita's body was recovered, Japanese government-affiliated Institute of Cetacean Research spokesman Glenn Inwood said.
"It is very sad for the crew and everyone at the ICR," Inwood said.
Officials are still investigating and have not yet determined the cause of the blaze.
The Nisshin Maru is the only ship in the fleet able to process whale carcasses and the season may have to be abandoned if the ship is inoperable. The fleet planned to hunt up to 945 whales from mid-December to mid-March. It was not immediately known how many whales have been killed so far.
New Zealand officials and environmentalists have expressed concern that the Nisshin Maru _ left without engine power by the fire and carrying 132,000 gallons of heavy oil and 211,000 gallons of furnace oil _ could threaten the Antarctic's biggest penguin rookery at Cape Adare, about 100 miles away.
Overnight, Nisshin Maru crew pumped out the water used in the firefighting effort and a 3 degree list had been corrected, New Zealand rescue official Steve Corbett said Saturday.
He said because the ship was virtually dead in the water, the main worry was that it could founder if the sea became rough.It was secured to two other Japanese whaling vessels but they would have limited control if the seas rose, Corbett said.
For that reason, the New Zealand government, which is responsible for rescues in the region, wanted the stricken ship towed north away from the Antarctic coast.
The Esperanza arrived within sight of the stricken vessel early Saturday, but the Japanese had refused offers of a tow, Greenpeace spokesman Steve Shellhorn said.
Japan says its annual whale hunts, begun after the International Whaling Commission imposed a global ban on commercial whaling in 1986, are for research. Environmental groups say the hunts are a pretext to keep Japan's tiny whaling industry alive.
