![]() Or what passed for it in the Never-Night of antarctic summer: a murky gloom of wind-tortured fog and blowing snow and spray - white eruptions that tore off the tops of the waves and streamed their shoulders in long streaks of foam. I dressed quickly, grabbed a dry suit and a life jacket, and ran up three lurching flights of narrow stairs to the bridge. He had said before the trip, "We will nonviolently intervene," but from what I could see of the preparations being conducted over the last week, he was readying for a full-scale attack. The mission of her captain, Paul Watson, and his forty-three member all-volunteer crew was to hunt down and stop the Japanese whaling fleet, which was engaged in what he considered illegal commercial whaling. The Farley Mowat was the flagship of the radical environmental group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. I listened to the deep throb of the diesel engine two decks below and the turbulent sloshing against my bolted porthole and felt a quickening in the ship.įifteen days before, we had left Melbourne, Australia, and headed due south. The storm had been building since the morning before. We were 200 miles off the Adlie Coast, Antarctica in a force 8 gale. The hull shuddered like a living animal and when the next roller lifted the stern I could hear the prop pitching out of water, beating air with a juddering moan that shivered the ribs of the 180-foot converted North Sea trawler. ISBN: 9781416532484 StormĪt three o'clock on Christmas morning the bow of the Farley Mowat plunged off a steep wave and smashed into the trough. The Whale Warriors The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet's Largest Mammals By Peter Heller Free Press Copyright © 2008 Peter Heller All right reserved. Watson aims his ship like a slow torpedo and gives the order: "Tell the crew, collision in two minutes." In 35-foot seas, it is a deadly game of Antarctic chicken in which the stakes cannot be higher. If the charismatic, intelligent Great Whales cannot be saved, there is no hope for the rest of the planet. For the Sea Shepherds there is no compromise. ![]() ![]() Office of Naval Intelligence issues a piracy warning, and international media begin to track the developing whale war. Watson presses his enemy while Japan threatens to send down defense aircraft and warships, Australia appeals for calm, New Zealand dispatches military surveillance aircraft, the U.S. The sailors on board both ships know that there will be no rescue in this desolate part of the ocean. The Japanese factory ship is ten times the tonnage of the Farley. In the ice-choked water a swimmer has minutes to live. With Force 8 gales, monstrous seas, and a crew composed of professional gamblers, Earthfirst! forest activists, champion equestrians, and ex-military, the action never stops. The oceans may be easy to ignore because they are literally under the surface, but scientists believe that the world's oceans are on the verge of total ecosystem collapse. The exploitation of endangered whales is emblematic of a terrible overexploitation of the seas that is now entering its desperate denouement. As Watson and his crew see it, the plight of the whales is also about the larger crisis of the oceans and the eleventh hour of life as we know it on Earth. The ship is all black, flies under a Jolly Roger, and is outfitted with a helicopter, fast assault Zodiacs, and a seven-foot blade attached to the bow, called the can opener. For two months, Heller was aboard the vegan attack vessel as it stalked the Japanese whaling fleet through the howling gales and treacherous ice off the pristine Antarctic coast. The Japanese, who are hunting endangered whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, in violation of several international laws, know he means business: Watson has sunk eight whaling ships to the bottom of the sea. The Farley is the flagship of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and captained by its founder, the radical environmental enforcer Paul Watson. In The Whale Warriors, veteran adventure writer Peter Heller takes us on a hair-raising journey with a vigilante crew on their mission to stop illegal Japanese whaling in the stormy, remote seas off the forbidding shores of Antarctica. Author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Dog Stars For the crew of the eco-pirate ship the Farley Mowat, any day saving a whale is a good day to die. ![]()
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