To all Sea Shepherd Crew and loyal supporters.
I just want to encourage all of you to be positive, strong and supportive as we struggle to move two ships, a helicopter and two different crews into position to tackle the greatest whale killing monsters on this planet.
Success is taking each obstacle and dealing with it and moving on to the next one. Success is never surrendering and always keeping an eye on the target, never wavering, never flinching, never being discouraged or distracted.
We have international bureaucrats and politicians working against us, from South Africa to Canada, from Australia to Japan, from Antigua to Norway. We have other supposendly allied organizations undermining us. We even have the Japanese Yakuza supporting the whalers. We have technical problems to overcome, not to mention we are 1.1 million dollars in debt and that we have barely enough funds to cover the fuel for this most ambitious, most dangerous and most expensive expedition we have ever undertaken.
But am I stressed out? No. I know we will do the very best we can with the resources we have to defend and protect as many whales as we possibly can from the horrendous thundering hellpoons of the damned imperial Japanese pirate whaling fleet.
We have the time to do this campaign right. The hurdles are awesome and we don’t have the money that Greenpeace, IFAW and others have. But we have something better, and that is a steadfast determination to stop thsse whale killers. We have a band of sixty men and women from over a dozen nations united in determination to make a difference and driven by an iron will to save lives.
We don’t have expensive direct mail programs or paid television advertising to solicit funds for support. But we do have a 12 year old Australian boy who walked the beach with a can and delivered over $250 last sunday. If only we had a thousand more like him.
We have hurdles to overcome with moving both ships into position but WE WILL get both these ships down to the Southern Ocean and this year and WE WILL confront those lethal obscene exploding harpoons and electric lances.
If need be we will return to New Zealand to refuel. We will not fail this year because we have invested to much money, gone heavily into debt and invested to much energy to fail. Most importantly we cannot and must not fail because our clients are depending on us.
Our clients are the defenseless Piked, Fin and Humpback whales these vicious whale molesting thugs are stalking and killing.
We don’t sail into the path of lethal harpoons and giant steel ships through kidney jarring hellish seas and the gut wrenching storms of the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties and the Sea Sickening Sixties because we want to hang some silly little protest banners before laughing sadistic whale serial killers. We don’t go down to the Southern Oceans to be polite, to be proper and to be politically correct.
We go down there as Samurai. The word means To Serve and we serve the cause of the whales and their right to life and freedom from lethal molestation. We serve in the spirit of Miyamoto Musashi, Japan’s greatest hero and philosopher who truly understood what the word meant, unlike these greed merchants who now run the nation of Japan like some brutal feudalistic corporation devoid of compassion and respect for nature.
The only hope these whales have is us. They won’t be saved by the passive chit chat of posturing politicians. They won’t be saved by the snuff flick producing ocean posers. They won’t be saved by all those direct-mail-species-of-the-month-club-feel-good-organizations with their petitions and admonishments to us that we are extremists because we seek to stop such wholesale cruelty and slaughter.
In my heart there burns an emotional extremism ideed, and it boils like quaking magma with a fiery indignant wrath at the senseless cruel stupidity of humanity. For three decades I have harnessed this wrath and tamed it to allow me to intervene effectively without lashing out violently and personally at those who inflict the most horrific of deaths upon gentle sentient beings.
But real extremism is the hot blood that flows in scarlet steaming streams into the frigid Antarctic waters. It is the heart breaking screams of harpooned whales as they cry out and struggle to live while their organs are shattered with the slashing hellish shrapnel of the exposive harpoon heads. It is the perversely diabolical sight of whales convulsing in agony at the tip of electric lances, and it is the smirking sneer of human conceit on the faces of the hardened killers who actually take pride in their monstrous bloody depravity.
We are the only defense for these armless large brained Buddha beings, and we will overcome any and all obstacles from bureaucrats to heavy seas and foul weather to the ruthless attitude of the Japanese killers in our quest to protect them.
We must give this campaign everything we have and we must sail with an audacious attitude into harm’s way to deliver the message that no longer will the world tolerate the wholesale destruction of the great whales. We want the whale wars to be ended and whaling abolished and the industry relugated to the the foul dust bin of history with other evil embarassments of human enterprises like slavery, death camps and the inquisition.
We must send the message that the murderous extermination of the whales will not be tolerated in the 21st Century and that the forces of ruthless greed and merciless profiteering can be defeated by the forces of passionate compassion.
So let’s tackle the obstacles, count down the miles and deliver ourselves from the opposite ends of this magnificent planet towards a point of confrontation where we will deliver a dramatic deserving showdown that will echo down the gilded corridors of the elitist Emperor’s palace to pour onto the neon embalzoned strip of the Ginza. Lets make them sit up and notice!
We will spend the holidays at sea on this great quest and we will herald in the New Year dwarfed by the magnificent tabletop icebergs off the Antarctic coast. We will scour the ice edge and outward with two ships and an aerial search, looking for the fleet of blubber stripping pirates whose ships literally drip with the hottest of blood and whose decks are sicky slick with the shattered brains and foul intestinal gore of the most intelligent, gentle and socially complex creatures on this planet.
In December we will sail into history and into harm’s way on a journey of mercy and intervention in an effort to remove the violent human stain that so befouls the Southern Oceans with the murderous massacre of the harmless Leviathans
I beseech you for your support because your encouragagement for this campaign gives us the means and the motivation to send so many volunteers on a marathon quest to defend the lives of non-human species. This is a leap in the human evolution for the exercise of selfless acts of kindness.
For the whales, the Oceans and the future.
Thank-you
Captain Paul Watson
Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977-
Co-Founder – The Greenpeace Foundation (1972)
Co-Founder – Greenpeace International (1979)
Director of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006)
Director – The Farley Mowat Institute
Director – www.harpseals.org
www.Seashepherd.org
Tel: 360-370-5650
Fax: 360-370-5651
Address: P.O. Box 2616
Friday Harbor, Wa 98250 USA
“Sail forth – steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.”
– Walt Whitman