A group of environmental activists have been removed from Shell-contracted icebreaker bound for Alaska.

On Thursday morning, six Greenpeace protesters boarded the Finnish icebreaker Nordica using inflatables, and then locked themselves to the vessel after tying up banners that criticize Arctic drilling. At the time of the boarding, the Nordica was underway in the Baltic Sea. The protesters lasted 10 hours aboard the ship before being arrested by Swedish authorities. According to Greenpeace, the arrested protesters were from Sweden, Finland, Austria, Israel, and Denmark.

After years of regulatory hurdles and legal challenges, it appears Shell Oil will finally have the approvals it needs to drill in the Arctic this summer. But that doesn’t mean the company’s struggles are over - heavy winter ice in the Alaskan Arctic is threatening to complicate Shell’s drilling plans.

"Our idea is to let Mother Nature dictate when we can get on our prospects," says Shell spokesperson Curtis Smith. "Obviously, we’d like to get there on July 15 - that’s the first day when we can legally start drilling our leases – and that’s what we’re planning to do. But we’re going to watch our forecasts closely of course and we’ll be ready no matter what.”

Twenty Greenpeace activists have occupied a Finnish icebreaker bound for Alaska to protest Shell’s exploratory drilling plans.

According to Bloomberg News, the group boarded the Nordica on Tuesday morning. The Nordica is currently moored in Helsinki’s harbor, and it was preparing to leave for Alaska to assist with Shell’s exploratory drilling program in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The activists have hung anti-drilling banners from the Nordica, and they have also locked themselves to the ship to keep it from departing Finland.

A 39-year-old man was medevaced from a freezer longliner on Tuesday.

The Coast Guard received a call this morning that a crewmember aboard the F/V Bering Leader was experiencing stroke-like symptoms. The vessel was about 60 miles northwest of Cold Bay at the time, and the Coast Guard was able to send a Jayhawk helicopter crew from Kodiak to respond to the emergency. The man was then brought to Cold Bay, where he was put on a Guardian Lifelight to Anchorage.

Record-breaking ice in the Bering Sea continues to take a toll on the snow crab industry. Crabbers, processors and regulators met last week to discuss the possibility of extending the season, but the unpredictability of the ice is frustrating planning efforts.

Last week marked a new low point for the Bering Sea snow crab fleet. With sea ice covering most of the fishing grounds and more than half of the fleet tied up in harbor, boats only managed to deliver one and half million pounds of crab. That’s the lowest weekly delivery so far in what’s already been an unusually slow season.

Last month, PenAir landed the country’s most expensive Essential Air Service contract for a flight from Presque Isle, Maine to Boston. Now, PenAir is on track to receive the second most expensive EAS subsidy in the nation as well, for flight service between Anchorage and Adak.

For the last decade, Alaska Airlines has flown a Boeing 737 combi plane out to Adak, twice a week. The plane can hold 72 passengers and enough cargo to keep the community of 300 people well stocked. In exchange for the service, Alaska Airlines receives a $1.6 million annual subsidy from the Department of Transportation as part of the Essential Air Service – or EAS – program, which compensates airlines for flying routes that would otherwise be unprofitable.

Pollock A season is quickly coming to an end. Crews are going home, roe has been auctioned off, and industry players are already looking ahead to what B season will bring.

As of mid-March, the fleet had taken 85 percent of their 472,000 metric ton allocation. They moved at a slightly faster pace than last year, despite having a smaller quota available. They also didn’t have too much trouble with Chinook bycatch – they’ve taken about 6,500 fish so far, and their bycatch rate is comparable to last year and well under the 62,000 fish hard cap that would shut the fishery down.

The world’s supply of king crab legs is about to increase. On Friday the Alaska Board of Fisheries voted to up the Aleutian Islands golden king crab allocation by five percent.

Unlike the other crab fisheries in the Bering Sea, the amount of golden king crab that can be harvested is set in regulation. There’s a model in development that will allow fisheries managers to decide on an annual basis how much crab can be caught sustainably, but that’s still a few years out.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game lent a hand to the struggling snow crab fleet over the weekend, opening up 650 square miles of new fishing grounds. This year’s snow crab season has been repeatedly put on hold because of ice conditions in the Bering Sea and the limited crab grounds are getting pretty well picked over. Although fishermen brought in almost 5.5 million pounds of crab last week, the number of crab caught in each pot was only about half the average.