May 6, 2023

What is a ship without a crew?

What is a crew without a ship?

What is a Ship and Crew without a land support base?

The ship and crew are the means.

The mission is the why,

The support base is the how?

Together we are a team united by passion, courage, imagination and persistence.

With just 25 days before departure, I would like to thank all of the crew that have made the ship ready. Thank you also to our very small staff who have to do so much with very little. 

I would like to thank all of the supporters who helped to pay for everything needed to get the ship ready. And much gratitude to our monthly supporters who provide us with the security to pay the bills. The more monthly supporters, the stronger we become.

I would especially like to thank all the chapter leaders and kudos to Deborah Bassett for raising needed funding with the two very successful auctions she organized.

Preparing the ship for this summer’s campaign brought back memories of our early days, back to 1978, when I bought our first ship in Hull, England and all the work we did then with very little resources, yet we launched a campaign within a few months to save baby seals in Canada and to hunt down the notorious pirate whaler the Sierra.

And here we are 45 years later back in Hull, England once again preparing a ship to sail into harm’s way.

I have to admit that my previous organization (which I can’t name) as it became larger because of our campaigns and because of Whale Wars, it began to attract people whose objectives were not the same as what we began with. Instead of prioritizing campaigns, funds began to be used for lawyers to take control away from the activist base led by me towards a bureaucracy of people more concerned with their job security. 

It became about control, covert registration of trademarks, partnerships with governments and corporations.  And that fire in our belly, that fire than made us who we were, that made us unique, that gave us the courage to confront nations, ships navies and bureaucrats, that fire was slowly doused.

But with this new ship and with our new base of loyal crew and supporters, the embers of our resolve have been sparked anew and the flames of action are beginning to blaze.

Those that took over sought to extinguish controversy. We intend to restore that controversy.

Those that took over want to put an end to confrontations with the enemies of life in the sea. We intend to accelerate these confrontations.

These are the people that have taken over and want to sail on calm waters with fair winds, to watch and take pictures and to sell merchandise and to enrich themselves. These are the people who, instead of confronting the enemies of life in the sea, are spending donor funds to sue any national entity that refuses to accept their authority, like the loyal activists from the UK, France, Brazil and Hungary. They are suing us to shut us up and to erase our history.

We don’t want to sue anyone, yet we are forced to defend ourselves and despite the need to do so our priority is to return to sea to fight the real enemies.

We have chosen to sail into the angry waters, to make waves, to rock the boat and proclaim that we will not acquiesce, that we will not accept mediocrity and we will not surrender to conformity.

What we were, we will be again. We don’t need the name that has been stolen, we don’t need the logos we created. We simply take on a new name and new logos and we raise a new flag to become Neptune’s Navy.

And we must never forget that our Ocean is dying and salvation for life in the sea does not come through complacency, compromise and mediocrity. It comes from passion, imagination, courage and defiance.