17 years in harbour

Hvalur 8 RE-388

The Icelandic whaling fleet has been in harbour for 17 years now.

The International Whaling Commission is meeting in St Kitts right now the whaling nations may have bought in enough minor nations to get a majority in favour of resuming whaling although under voting rules that is only a moral victory, takes a super-majority to resume.

This may seem like cheating, buying votes of nations, and it is. But what is sauce for the goose... the tactic of bringing in minor and landlocked nations to vote on whaling was an innovation by anti-whaling environmentalists 20-30 years ago..

The whaling ships are a minor tourist attraction, particularly after having been sunk in harbour a decade ago (in a cruelly stupid act that mirrored the french sinking of a Greenpeace ship, fortunately no one died when the whaling ships sunk).

Whale watching is now a major tourist attraction in Iceland and this has put considerable internal pressure on the Icelandic government to back off the requests to resume commercial whaling, the former being now more valuable as an industry.
When I were a lad, whale watching was also a matter for sight seeing - people would drive to the whaling station to see the whales landed and flensed... quite a sight.

IWC meeting will go as before, the US and assorted small islands will get commercial catches on historical and ethnic basis, Iceland, Norway and Japan will be denied and will continue with modest "scientific" catches. In either case the actual level of endangerment to the species involved will be somewhat orthogonal to the political decision to hunt them, or not.
Iceland's record in conserving whales is good, including the first ever hunting moratorium in national waters. Whales have been hunted there for ~ 1000 years, as recently as the 19th century whale catches were critical to survival for large sections of the population, and the language reflects this (an aphorism for great fortune is "a whale drifted to your shore").

Whale meat was sold in every grocery store when I grew up, a good cut is comparable to fine grade beef, albeit with a gamy "fishy" tang to it; it became stigmatised as "poor people's food" sometime around then, but the blubber (pickled - two kinds, the smooth outer blubber and the stringy inner blubber) continued to be regarded as a delicacy.

You can still buy it, if you know where to look, and several restaurants serve whale. In the last decade there has been a strong trend for traditional and local food as part of actually quite excellent nouvelle Icelandic cuisine, try it if you want. Makes a change from the puffin in cream sauce.