Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Well it looked like a whale...

...sleek and black and with fin-like things...


So it's excusable really that the Japanese whalers should have rammed the Ady Gil, knocking a chunk off its bow.

That picture is a screenshot from the video which can be found here. I won't speculate on the boating laws that might apply in this case, but it is not clear to me that the Ady Gil was actually stationary (as Sea Shepherd have claimed). It was basically idling at the start of the clip, but seems to start generating a significant wake a few seconds before the impact. Hopefully there will be enough hot air generated over this to end the current cold spell.

Having seen a couple more videos, it is pretty clear that the Japanese boat turned sharply towards the Ady Gil and rammed it at high speed. See the boat spinning round at the start of this video



also confirmed by the changing angle in the first few seconds of this:



2 comments:

Hank Roberts said...

Can you tell us what the Japanese speaker you can hear in the audio track is saying? He's repeating something, I think.

James Annan said...

Yes, just about.