Sea Shepherds > by National Geographic

This is an excerpt from a new groundbreaking article by the international magazine NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC written by a freelance journalist who travelled with the Sea Shepherd crew during their 2005/6 protests against the Japanese whaling operations in the Antarctic Ocean. COMMITTED TO THE CORE: Joel Capolongo (far right) and other members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society prepare to confront the 8,000-ton Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru. What woke me at 3 a.m. on Christmas morning was the bow of the ship plunging off a steep wave and smashing into the trough. The hull shuddered like a living animal, and when the next roller lifted the stern, I could hear the prop pitching out of the water, beating the air with a juddering moan that shivered the ribs of the 180-foot (55-meter) converted North Sea trawler. We were 200 miles (322 kilometers) off the Adélie Coast, Antarctica, in a force 8 gale. The storm had been building since the previous morning. I lay in the dark and breathed. Something was different. 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. Fifteen days before, we had left Melbourne, Australia, and headed due south on the Farley Mowat, the flagship of the radical environmental group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The mission of her captain, Paul Watson, and his 43-member, all-volunteer crew was to hunt down and stop the Japanese whaling fleet from engaging in what they considered illegal commercial whaling. Watson had said before the trip, "We will nonviolently intervene." But judging by the preparations conducted over the past week, it seemed he was readying for a full-scale attack. I dressed quickly, grabbed a dry suit and a life jacket, and ran up three lurching flights of narrow stairs to the bridge. Dawn. Or what passed for it in the never night of Antarctic summer. A murky gloom of wind-tortured fog mingled with blowing snow and spray. White eruptions tore off the tops of the waves and streamed their shoulders in long streaks of foam. The sea was chaos. When I had gone to sleep four hours earlier, the swells were 20 feet (6 meters) high and building. Now monsters over 30 feet (9 meters) rolled under the stern and pitched the bow wildly into a featureless sky. The timberwork of the bridge groaned and creaked. The wind battered the thick windows and ripped past the superstructure with a buffeted keening. Watson, 55, with thick, nearly white hair and beard, wide cheekbones, and packing some extra weight underneath his exposure suit, sat in the high captain's chair, on the starboard side of the bridge, looking alternately at a radar screen over his head and at the sea. He has a gentle, watchful demeanor. Like a polar bear. Alex Cornelissen, 38, his Dutch first officer, was in the center at the helm, trying to run with the waves. Cornelissen looks too thin to go anyplace cold, and his hair is buzzed to a near stubble. "Good timing," Cornelissen said to me with the tightening of his mouth that is his smile. "Two ships on the radar. The closest is under two miles (three kilometers) off. If they're icebergs, they're doing six knots." "Probably the Nisshin Maru and the Esperanza," Watson said. "They're just riding out the storm." He was talking about the 8,000-ton factory ship on which the Japanese butcher and pack the harpooned whales, and Greenpeace's flagship, which had sailed with its companion boat the Arctic Sunrise from Cape Town more than a month before and had been shadowing and harassing the whalers for weeks. Where the five other boats of the Japanese whaling fleet had scattered in the storm, no one could say. I stared at the green blips on the main radar screen. Was it possible? Had Watson found, in hundreds of thousands of square miles of Southern Ocean, his prey? It seemed against all odds, even with the recon helicopter he'd picked up in Hobart, Tasmania, on his way south. Even with the Antarctic storm that was now veiling his approach from the unwary whalers. Even with the informer onboard the Esperanza who had secretly relayed the fleet's general position to Watson just two nights before. Because in those two days the fleet could have sailed 500 miles (805 kilometers) away. I looked at Watson in his red exposure suit and began to pull on my own. Watson turned to Cornelissen. "Wake all hands," he said.  Read the rest of the story at NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. Also check out: WHALE WARS: DAREDEVIL FLICKS Watch video footage of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's Farley Mowat chasing down whaling ships in the Southern Ocean. Watch the video >> BREAKING NEWS: Five Japanese fishing companies that owned the nation's whaling fleet quit the whaling business. Read the story >>