Whaling base or Kitobaza is an industrial fishing vessel with a displacement of up to 45 thousand tons, designed for long-term autonomous navigation. The whale base is designed for cutting and processing whales and the production of them products. Whaling vessels (with a navigation autonomy of not more than 1 month) received food, fuels and lubricants, and everything necessary for whaling from the whaling depot. Power plants provided whalers a speed of 15 knots or more. The fuel tanks were washed, degassed, steamed as they were emptied, and served to store whale fat, bone meal, salted meat and liver, etc. There was also a freezer for storing edible whale meat.
The first floating whaling depot operated in the South Atlantic in the season 1905-1906, it was the Admiral belonging to Norway. He was accompanied by 2 whalers . In the season 1925-1926. For the first time, the Norwegian whale base Lansing operated in the Ross Sea with a slip - an inclined plane for lifting prey whales to the deck. The base belonged to Lars Christensen . This innovation, proposed by the Norwegian captain P. Sörle, laid the foundation for the modern pelagic whale fishing. It made it possible to cover the entire Antarctic waters with the fishery, and to cut and process whales caught on board the vessel in almost any weather. By the mid 30s. almost all whalers were equipped with slips . The last whaling depot in the world, Nissin Maru , ceased operations in the spring of 2014 due to a ban on catching whales in the Antarctic waters.
Whalers in the USSR
In the Soviet Union, the first whaling depot - "Aleut" - was rebuilt in 1930 from an American bulk carrier. In 1932-1968 she fished in the waters of the North Pacific. In 1946, from reparations from Germany, the Vikingen whale base was obtained, renamed to Glory , which worked in Antarctica until 1966, and in 1966-1970. - in the Pacific Ocean . Specialized whalers “ Soviet Ukraine ” and “ Soviet Russia ” were built in 1959-1961. in Nikolaev . They could process up to 75 whales with a total weight of 4000 tons per day, producing up to 1000 tons of fat and 200 tons of food flour with 100% carcass processing. The Yuri Dolgoruky whale base was rebuilt in 1959 from a German ocean liner, made 15 Antarctic voyages, producing 58 thousand whales of 22 species. Two more bases of smaller tonnage - Vladivostok and the Far East were built in Germany in 1962-1963. They operated year-round, and between the seasons for whaling were used to process fish feed.
In the late 1960s. combined vessels for the extraction and processing of whales appeared (for example, such as Peder Huse, Norway). A sharp drop in the number of whales made the work of the whaling fleets unprofitable, the latter made a fishing trip in 1986-1987. flotilla "Soviet Ukraine". In 1995, the government of independent Ukraine sold the Soviet Ukraine whaling depot to Turkey for scrap. The remaining Soviet whalers since 1975 have been redesigned into floating fish factories or scrapped.
See also
- History of whaling in Russia
- Project 393 whalers
Sources
- Great Soviet Encyclopedia : [in 30 vol.] / Ch. ed. A.M. Prokhorov . - 3rd ed. - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1969-1978.