Activists say Japanese whalers have made no kills in two days

Environmental activists Monday said they had been pursuing Japanese whalers through blizzards in the Antarctic for two days during which the harpooners had been unable to kill any whales.

Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel trailing the Japanese fleet, said they had intercepted the whalers on Saturday morning in dangerous conditions off Antarctica.

"Yesterday we were locked into the ice, we had to work our way out of about a dozen miles of ice and there were some heavy swells and large chunks so it was a little hairy for a while," Watson told AFP.

"But we are still pursuing them. They haven't killed any whales. We will keep on them and the longer we keep on them, the more we can impact their profits and their quotas."

The society's vessel the "Steve Irwin" remained on the tail of the Japanese whale-processing ship Nisshin Maru, which Watson said was in Australia's Antarctic waters.

Watson said the activists, who initially attempted to hit the Japanese harpoon boat the Yushin Maru 2 with stink bombs, would continue to try to hamper the whalers, who kill hundreds of whales a year.

"We will just harass them, blockade them, do everything to prevent them from resuming whaling," he said.

"Most likely they will run and we will chase and they'll run and we'll chase and that's fine. As long as they are running they are not killing whales."

For the past four years Watson has led a Sea Shepherd vessel to find, track and harass the whaling ships during their hunting season, the southern hemisphere summer.

In an online log, Sea Shepherd said this year was the earliest in the season that they had been able to locate the Japanese fleet.

Watson said navigating through icebergs the size of houses "tossed about like confetti in massive swells driven by gale-force winds" was frightening.

"I had to thread the ship between those bucking chunks of lethal ice knowing that if just one of them was tossed against our hull, we would be holed and sunk very quickly," he said on the site.

An international moratorium on commercial whaling was imposed in 1986 but Japan has continued to hunt under an exclusion allowing for scientific research, although it concedes most of the meat ends up on dinner plates.