Once the flagship of the environmental protection group Sea Shepherd, and an often irritant to authorities and the MV Farley Mowat now sits on the harbour bottom at dockside in Shelburne, Nova Scotia.
Re-named Farley Mowat after the late world-famous author and Sea Shepherd benefactor, the ship often forced issues with whaling ships, sealers and illegal fishing vessels on the high seas around the world.
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The ship was seized in 2008 by Canadian authorities who accused it of violating a distance limit and interfering with the seal hunt off Canada’s east coast.
At the time, Sea Shepherd the RCMP tactical team were uneccessarily aggressive and that the ship was in international waters, something Canadian authorities dispute. Sea Shepherd founder, Canadian Paul Watson, called it “an act of piracy”.
The ship, which was already 50 years old at the time, was taken initially to Sydney, Nova Scotia.
The seized ship was sold by the government to cover berthing costs to an Amercian operation and was moved to Lunenburg, N.S, to be converted to a expedition vessel for ocean research.
That never happened and the vessel was again sold to cover berthing costs. With the superstructure already removed for scrap, the ship was being towed from Lunenburg to be scrapped but the tug had engine trouble and the vessel ended up at the dockside in Shelburne where it sat since last September months and was once again under arrest for unpaid dockage fees.
The current owner, a Nova Scotia scrap dealer is facing a $14,000 bill.
Ken Taylor, rear commodore of the Shelburne Harbour Yacht Club, said the boat started sinking Wednesday night. There has been some leakage of remaining fuel on board and the Coast Guard has put a boom around the area to contain the spill.
Not worth the cost of scrapping it
Taylor said it will be a big mess to clean up. ‘It wasn’t worth enough for scrap” he says, “ now it’s a pollution thing, plus trying to lift it — that’s a lot of money trying to refloat that — and then what do you do with it? What do you do with it even before?”
Paul Watson now claims that the organization deliberately sought the ship’s arrest so it would become the government’s problem as decommissioning the ageing ship would have been far too expensive for the marine conservation society.
On a social media site he wrote, ““Farley would be smiling to know that the ship that bears his name continues to be an annoying irritation for Canadian authorities.”
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