By: CHRIS GRAEME
THE GREENPEACE ship MY Arctic Sunrise is in Lisbon for its routine seaworthy check-up.
The icebreaker, one of three ships the environmental group has, entered a dry dock at Alcântara’s Rocha Docks on Thursday last week.
The 49m long ship arrived after a three-month tour of duty in the Mediterranean, where its crew of activists denounced destructive activities and documented marine areas in need of protection.
The Arctic Sunrise will be based out of Lisbon in Portuguese and Mediterranean waters for three months, partly to publicise Greenpeace’s campaign on the dangers of over-fishing and to attempt to reduce the quotas of fish caught that are considered in danger of extinction including salmon, Norwegian and Canadian codfish, and swordfish.
Earlier last week, the Arctic Sunrise was patrolling the coastal waters off the Algarve.
Today, the ship, classified as a sea-going motor yacht, carries out scientific support work on climate change in the Arctic and Greenland.
Yet ironically, the 949-tonne vessel started life in 1975 as the sealer Polar Bjorn and was later confronted by Greenpeace activists delivering equipment to the French government to build an airstrip through a penguin habitat in the Antarctic.
Since being acquired by Greenpeace in 1995, the Arctic Sunrise has taken part in many campaigns, including investigating oil pollution and equipment dumping off Brent Spar in the North Sea as a result of oil drilling, chasing and embarrassing pirate fishermen illegally catching the Patagonian Toothfish off Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, as well as harassing polluters in the Mediterranean.
In 1997 it became the first ship to circumnavigate James Ross Island in the Antarctic, which was previously an impossible journey until a 200m thick ice shelf connecting the island to the Antarctic continent collapsed global warming.
In the Pacific Ocean, it was even in the firing line of the US military’s Star Wars anti-missile shield tests.
It then went on to patrol Argentine waters in 1998 to try and stop illegal toxic waste dumping in the sea.
In October 2007, the Arctic Sunrise was actually attacked and damaged by the Japanese whaler Nisshin Maru in the Antarctic Ocean.
The Arctic Sunrise is manned by a crew of up to 28 volunteers and activists, aged between 20 and 60, 24 hours a day.
“I’ve been with Greenpeace for 10 years but have been at sea since the age of 16,” says Captain Peter Bouket, aged 58, who has already skippered all three Greenpeace vessels including the Rainbow Warrior and the Esperanza.
The activists and volunteers, who do a three-month stint of duty, come from 15 different countries including Lebanon, Chile, Argentina, Turkey, Brazil, Canada and various European countries.
