After a few samples are taken, they point out, minke meat ends up in Japan's sushi bars.
The largest was a group of 44 bottlenose dolphins spotted near Anglesey, while others included minke whale and harbour porpoise.
Two companies in town offers tours in search of these peaceful creatures, spying minke whales, humpback whales and sometimes blue whales.
IWC's scientists have determined that in certain waters minke, fin, Gray and Bryde's whales are now abundant enough to be hunted commercially.
Japan, however, is allowed to hunt between 300-400 minke whales annually in the sanctuary under a clause allowing a long-term scientific research program.
Eva Maria Thorarinsdottir, marketing manager of Reykjavik's Elding Whale Watching, says minke whales were much friendlier before hunting resumed, but now they avoid ships.
Attracted by plankton, krill and large shoals of herring, minke, fin, humpback, and the occasional killer whale habitually pass through the briny coastal waters between Donegal and Cork City.
Mr. Jonsson says Hrefnuveidimenn still isn't profitable, mainly due to scale: It has only two ships and government permission to kill around 40 minke whales each year.
Helen Michie's Whale Skull Bone, artwork in the shape of the bones of a minke whale, is planned for a site above the beach at Dunnet Bay.
In the early 2000s, "there were plenty of minke whales in Antarctica, in the Northern Hemisphere, and the production rate is so quick compared with other animals, " Komatsu says.
The sanctuary is home to minke whales of the Southern Hemisphere, the only remaining population of great whales in the Antarctic still at a level close to their natural abundance.
It was originally thought that the mammal was a minke whale, but the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group now believes it is more likely to be a fin or a sei whale.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | Tide dashes hopes of moving whale
In April 2002 a dead minke whale was washed up on the coast of Normandy, France, with nearly a kilogram of plastic bags in her stomach that she had mistaken for food.
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Even if Norway can win the argument about minke whale harvesting being sustainable, it is still up against a well funded political lobby that seems to regard hunting any whale as unethical - unless done by American or Russian native peoples.
At the IWC meeting in Morocco, there was a real chance of emerging with an agreement under which Japan would have pledged to cut its Antarctic catch of minke whales to a few hundred per year now and 150 per year in 2015.
The glossy black fin and back of a minke whale rose a hundred yards astern, two yellow-striped dolphins broke water and plunged down again, and then the flow of the turned tide could be seen as a chop on the water, small standing waves that indicated the Minch was reversing its direction.
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