For decades, Mr. Watson and his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society have rammed, sabotaged, shot water canons at and thrown stink bombs on whalers and commercial fishing vessels. The Ady Gil, the high-tech speedboat he sought to deploy against Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean this winter, may have been his most expensive loss so far at sea but his has been a career filled with dangerous mishaps and financial losses – both for his crews and for the boats he’s targeted.
In a press release Wednesday, he said while the loss of the Gil, which he said was worth $2 million, was a heavy blow, he’d happily trade it to save the life of one whale. While more whales are likely to be successfully harpooned by the Japanese fleet this season thanks to the loss of the ship and the diversion of other resources its caused, his extreme views on the matter were captured in a war of words between Watson and Greenpeace in 2008. Greenpeace, which opposes the use of violence in its campaigns because it says its conservation views are more effectively spread into policy levels by constructive engagement, was singled out by Watson as “Yellowpeace.”
That year, Greenpeace criticized Watson and his tactics as “morally wrong” and counter-productive because “If there’s one way to harden Japanese public opinion and ensure whaling continues, it’s to use violent tactics against their fleet.” Watson responded by appearing to compare the plight of the whales to that of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. “It was this kind of attitude by Jewish leaders in the Warsaw ghetto that resulted in the Holocaust. The leaders begged the people to not resist and to allow the Germans and the Poles to save them,” he wrote, defending his tactics.
The jury is still out on who caused Wednesday’s collision. Watson’s group says they were deliberately rammed; the Japanese say the Gil steered into them. A view of the video shows some merit to both claims, though typically larger vessels are expected to make every effort to steer away from smaller ones on the high seas, and the Japanese were clearly well-aware of their proximity to the Gill, given that they were directing water canon fire at it before, during and after the collision.
But they certainly had cause to be concerned about the Sea Shepherd vessels activities, since the group has a record of aggressively targeting whalers for ramming, and worse.
What are the group’s tactics?
In a 2007 New Yorker article, Watson claimed his group has successfully sunk 10 ships in port. The New Yorker reporter said that claim was hard to verify, and all they were certain of was that the group had successfully sunk two ships in port and had tried and failed to scuttle two others.
One of Watson’s older ships used to carry a tally of sunk whalers on its side in the fashion of a fighter ace, and among the sinkings the group took credit for was that of the Sierra, an unlicensed whaler. In 1979, Watson rammed the ship and damaged it at sea, and it limped into port. Limpet mines were later attached to its hull and brought it down.
Watson proudly defended his claim of 10 ships sunk on his website, saying “we rammed (1979) and we sunk (1980) the pirate whaler Sierra in Portugal, the whalers Isba I and Isba II in Spain in 1980, the Hvalur 6 and Hvalur 7 in Iceland in 1986, the Nybraena in 1992, the Senet in 1994 and the Morild in 1998, all in Norway.” Though there have been no more recent sunken ships, the video below is of a Sea Shepherd attempt on a Japanese whaler in 2008.
found on seashepherd.org
An advancing white shark typically means doom for any large sea mammal it approaches, even for huge elephant seals off Guadalupe Island off Mexico’s Pacific coast. (© National Geographic/Mauricio Handler)
A polar bear stands on sea ice. The ice is critical to its habitat, and is decreasing in the warming Arctic. (© National Geographic/Paul Nicklen)
Off the coast of western Australia, small fish cluster around a whale shark, using it as shelter from predators. (© National Geographic/Brian Skerry)
Spawning salmon dominate traffic in the Ozernaya River on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia. (© National Geographic/Randy Olson)
To the walrus, ice is life. An oxygen-breathing marine mammal, it relies on the ice as a place to rest, to give birth, to nurse and to migrate. And with global warming, the ice is disappearing. Their annual migration is becoming a race against time and distance, depth and disaster. (© National Geographic/Paul Nicklen).
