China demands more commercial icebreakers

It took six hours for Yu Fengfu to travel the last 30 nautical miles before docking in his ice-covered hometown harbor in east China over the weekend.

"The sea ice was as thick as 30 centimeters. People on our 18 fishing boats had to take turns to cut ice centimeter by centimeter in order to return to harbor," the 40-year-old fisherman in Shouguang, Shandong Province, said Wednesday.

He is so frustrated at being unable to go back out fishing until the ice melts.

The water surface of 17,000 square km on the Bohai and Yellow seas has been frozen over the last month. Therefore, Yu is far from alone.

The sea icing has affected lives of tens of thousands of fishermen and aquatic farmers mainly in Shandong, where these people have raised their voice calling for commercial icebreakers to help carve out water lanes during the icy period.

"If the harbor had an icebreaker, we could get home much more easily and go fishing for another month, as the price of seafood is rising sharply as the Spring Festival comes," Yu said.

The festival, or the lunar Chinese New Year, falls on Feb. 9 this year. Chinese are likely to spend a lot on family-reunion banquets during festivities, which usually drives food prices up.

"We can earn at least 400,000 yuan (64,300 U.S. dollars) in the month ahead of the Spring Festival if we go fishing, but now the only thing we can do is to wait for the sea ice to melt in spring," Yu said.

China only has one professional ice breaking vessel for civilian use, the Snow Dragon, which works mainly for China's exploration in Polar regions.

Wang Weiyang, a State Oceanic Administration (SOA) official, agreed that China lacks icebreakers. Besides the need for more of the vessels for deep sea exploration, the country needs medium and small types to reduce fisheries' and port traffic's potential losses to sea icing.

The government had long considered sea icing as a natural disaster. However, the problem could be readily solved once an icebreaker slits open waterways between the ice blockage.

"The government has recognized the demand, but it takes time to plan for buying and maintaining icebreakers," Wang said.

Currently, no domestic shipyards produce commercial icebreakers. Some industry insiders have suggested Chinese ship producers look for partnership with Nordic countries to make icebreakers in China, the official said.

The sea ice this year has been more severe than that in the same period of the past two years and will continue worsening in January, said Guo Mingke, vice director of the SOA North China Sea Branch and also manager of the Sime Darby Port in Shouguang.

Lingering cold fronts have driven temperatures down to minus 10 degrees Celsius in the region.

Over 600 fishing boats have been grounded by ice in Yu's home harbor, with four to five boats still sailing in high seas and facing great difficulty coming back.

"It's very dangerous for fishing boats to approach ice-covered harbors, as most of them are made of wood. Floating sea ice may cut open hull bottoms," said Zhang Hongyong, a fisherman of Dongying, also in Shandong.

Mao Hongjun, who makes a living from clam farming in coastal waters, said that aquatic farmers also need help to break the ice.

"I have not been able to do anything in the past months. I don't know whether my clams are alive," he said.

Guo said icebreakers with different tonnages are in dire demand to ensure traffic flows and cope with emergencies at sea.