The record breaking high-tech 24 m power yacht EARTHRACE is currently being transformed into a black coated carbon reinforced stealth yacht to take on whalers and the Southern Ocean.
The yacht is to sneak up on Japanese whalers in some of the world’s most dangerous ice berg saturated locations. The yacht will then frustrate and protest against the whalers and their bloody work.
The 24m trimaran powerboat has special paint which deflects radar waves so she can sneak up on Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean and pounce almost unseen. Black carbon paint will make EARTHRACE almost completely invisible to the radar systems of other ships and she has also been fitted with a broadband radar which cannot be detected by other vessels.
Pete Bethune skippered EARTHRACE last year when it became the fastest powerboat to achieve circumnavigation (60 days, 23 hours, 49 minutes completed in June 2008) commented:
“It is like a stealth boat…You do what you have got to do.”
Mr. Bethune said that Earthrace was being purchased by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and she is to join MV ‘Steve Irwin’ on a three-month mission to help save southern ocean whales against the Japanese whaling programme.
Conditions in the Southern Ocean for the protest voyage would be “brutal”, Mr. Bethune said, but EARTHRACE was a tough boat and well proven in heavy seas. EARTHRACE has been reinforced with an additional half ton of Kevlar which was applied to her hull beneath the waterline to help with contact with sea ice.
Mr. Bethune said EARTHRACE would not follow Sea Shepherd tactics and try to ram Japanese whalers and commented that:
“We need different tactics. I can’t tell you what they are. But we will stir things up down there. We are well resourced.” The [whalers] believe they have got a right to continue taking these whales and we believe they haven’t.”
Yacht Earthrace will depart for Perth Australia from Auckland New Zealand at the end of the month.
On December 7 she will then set out on her mission to save the whales and protect the oceans.