Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations recently sent a ship, the Rubin, to break up the ice in the Sinyavinsky Channel to free some 100 trapped Beluga whales, but severe weather forced the ship to seek safe harbor, as RIA Novosti reports.
The ship sailed to the port of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in Kamchatka to refuel and will reportedly attempt to resume rescue activities this month when the weather improves.
It's probably a good idea to wait out the stormy weather in the North Pacific for the sake of the sailors.
In the past couple of weeks the stormy weather of the North Pacific has been particularly brutal. To the southwest, around the Sea of Okhotsk, two ships ran into serious trouble.
Right before Christmas, a Cambodian-flagged ship, the Ginga, sank in the La Perouse Strait just south of Sakhalin. Three people have died. And this month in the Kuril Islands, the Irina, a Russian refrigerator vessel that calls Vladivostok its home port, broke down with a flooded engine room and punctured hull. High winds and waves made rescue initially difficult, though all 19 sailors were eventually saved. The oil rig Kolskaya went down while being towed in December and sank off the east coast of Sakhalin Island.
In Russia, a different story about the Beluga whales has captured the headlines, which has not yet been reported in Western outlets. Apparently, hunters in Chukotka have only found 12 beluga whales in the channel, rather than the 100 originally reported. Lubomir Mukha, the head of EMERCOM in Chukotka, stated:
"Numbers of marine mammal hunters and (others) say that now in the ice there are no more than 12 animals in captivity. Only one polynya (lead in ice) remains open, whereas previously there were at least five."
If the hunters are right, that means that up to 88 Beluga whales may have escaped. Scientists at the Chukotka Fishery Research Center contend that there is enough food in the channel to sustain the pod of 12 whales until next month.