Sea Shepherd Names New Patrol Vessel
Sea Shepherd Global has named its new patrol vessel Ocean Warrior under construction at Damen Shipyards Antalya in Turkey.
The ship name was selected by a panel of representatives from Sea Shepherd and the Dutch Postcode Lottery, from over 1,400 entries in Sea Shepherd’s Name Our New Patrol Vessel competition. Because of multiple entries of the winning name, a supervised raffle was used to select the competition winner, Mrs. Smole from the Netherlands.
“We are extremely excited to announce the name of our new patrol vessel, Ocean Warrior,” said CEO of Sea Shepherd Global, Captain Alex Cornelissen. “The selection process was much more difficult than we thought, with a high level of entries being submitted. We want to thank everyone who entered the competition to help us write conservation history,” he said.
Construction on Ocean Warrior, which is scheduled for completion in September, has been made possible by the generosity of the Dutch Postcode Lottery, the People's Postcode Lottery in the United Kingdom and the Svenska PostkodLotteriet in Sweden, who together granted €8.3 million ($9.4 million) to Sea Shepherd for the project.
Sea Shepherd remains tight-lipped about what the Ocean Warrior’s first at-sea mission will be.
“We are counting down the days until the launch of the ship, on what will inevitably be a bad day for poachers and a great day for the oceans,” said Geert Vons, Director of Sea Shepherd Netherlands.
About the National Postcode Lottery
The National Postcode Lottery was founded in 1989 to support charity. Currently, 2.7 million Dutch nationals play the lottery, and each month they can win hundreds of thousands in prizes. At the same time, the participants are supporting important causes with half of all ticket sales being divided amongst 95 charities.
Since the Postcode Lottery was founded, €4.7 billion has been dispended to humanitarian and nature causes. Since 2005, the Postcode Lottery has also been active in the UK and Sweden, where the People’s Postcode Lottery and the Svenska Postkod Lotteriet, also raise funds for charity. In Holland, the National Postcode Lottery works together with the BankGiro Lottery and the Vrienden Lottery, forming a group called the Charity Lotteries.
Novamedia/Postcode Lottery is the second largest private donor to charity in the world.