
“You can't separate oceans and animals; otherwise it’s just a big dead swimming pool.” Captain Adam Meyerson Read his story “I’ll go where Sea Shepherd needs me.” Marc Rosenberg Cook Read his story “I had to Google what ‘poop deck’ was because I didn’t want to ask.” Molly Weymouth Deckhand Read her story

The morning is bright, the night watch has just finished and the captain stands on the bridge, staring intently at a weather map on a laptop computer.

“That, right there,” he says, rolling the cursor around an angry red blotch on the screen and speaking to no-one in particular, “is about as bad as I’ve ever seen it.”

Adam Meyerson wants to hurry. His crew are in a hurry. They are on a ship specially built for speed and the urgency of their mission is pressing.

“If it takes a month to find the whalers, whales are dying,” says the ship’s cook, Marc Rosenberg, one of a crew of hunters who refuse to eat meat.

Their quarry is invisible on the charts but somewhere, far beyond the horizon, Japan’s whaling fleet is already sailing towards a summer slaughter in the icy waters off Antarctica.

Meyerson is captain of the Ocean Warrior, the newest and fastest ship the anti-whaling activist group Sea Shepherd has ever sailed – a vessel bought courtesy of an extraordinary $12 million charity gift made this year by the Dutch national lottery.

Adam Meyerson on the bridge of the Ocean Warrior.

We spent two days aboard the Ocean Warrior between Melbourne and Hobart as the crew prepared to sail for the Southern Ocean to put themselves between the whales and Japanese harpoons. This last Australian leg of their trip offered a rare chance for the crew to train: dropping a small speed boat overboard to practise harassing the whalers, and blast-firing the ship’s giant water cannon. Pods of dolphins splashed alongside.


But the leg to Hobart was also a glimpse of life onboard for what could be a testing voyage of three months or longer for their controversial high-sea protest, the crew sustained by little more than a strict vegan diet and righteous indignation. Short workout videos by a fitness guru named Sean T are a popular distraction, keeping the crew strong between the ceaseless rhythm of four-hour shifts followed by eight hours rest in the vast ocean emptiness.

“You definitely learn to trust your ship and captain,” says deckhand Molly Weymouth, a Brit who finished a degree in English literature and psychology, and had never sailed before joining Sea Shepherd a couple of years ago. “But at the same time you’re down there and you’re, like, wow, and just completely separated from civilisation.”

The crew is multinational: Germans, French, Americans, one Australian and a Spaniard. It’s handy to get plenty of embassies involved when citizens get into trouble, one quips.

The coming weeks promise to be intense, not only for the activists and the whalers but also for Australia’s diplomatic ties with Japan in a region already fraught with strife and political uncertainty. This will be the first time Sea Shepherd has directly confronted the whalers since 2013 and the first time the activists claim to have a ship fast enough to outpace the Japanese fleet.

And this summer could also mark another dramatic first – the first pictures the public will see of bloodied dead whales being dragged from the ocean after Japan stubbornly circumvented an International Court of Justice ruling that had declared its so-called “science” to be illegal.

“Sabotage activities by Sea Shepherd are not acceptable as they threaten our research ships and the lives and safety of their crew,” says a spokesman for the Japanese embassy in Canberra, Tetsuya Kuroi.

Tokyo has now withdrawn from the international court’s jurisdiction to head off any future challenge and has urged countries – including Australia – that allow Sea Shepherd to dock to reconsider the potential threat. Some hardliners in Japan regard the protesters as close to being terrorists.