Maritime Whale is a ship monitoring project from Rhode Island Marine Animal Support (RIMAS), a non-profit charity established in 2014 to protect North Atlantic right whales from ship strikes. From 2014 through 2017 our work was conducted in the shipping lanes and approaches to Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, legally interacting with ships when they were observed transiting the Block Island Seasonal Management Area (BISMA) at high non-compliant speed. 

 

We saw right whales in the Narragansett and Buzzard's Bay Traffic Separation Scheme (NOAA chart 13218), whales in the shipping lanes, unprotected and clearly vulnerable to ship strikes. In 2018 we produced a report (available on request) on the risk of ship-strikes in Rhode Island Sound, which we presented to the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium (NARWC) in November 2018. Early in 2019, we noticed another high-risk area at Charleston, South Carolina, and subsequently at the neighboring port of Savannah, Georgia. We presented a compliance report on that analysis to the NARWC annual meeting in November 2019. This website is an extension of that report, designed to provide up-to-date near real-time monitoring, analysis, and reporting on a daily basis.

 

Maritime Whale is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a subsidiary of Rhode Island Marine Animal Support, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, primarily funded through RIMAS board-member contributions. 

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