June 1, 2023

The crew of the John Paul DeJoria II along with Captain Paul Watson, will depart from New York City on June 3rd, bound for the waters between Iceland and Greenland, where a modern-day Captain Ahab, an Icelander named Kristján Loftsson plans to kill between 145 and 200 endangered Fin whales.

We plan to stop him.

Loftsson is an 80-year-old businessman and one of the wealthiest men in Iceland. He does not need to kill whales, but he openly boasts that he loves to kill whales, and because of his wealth he has great influence with the Icelandic government to support his obsession, even though killing endangered Fin whales is illegal under international conservation law. It’s a violation of the International Whaling Commission’s global moratorium on commercial whaling.

If Iceland manages to ignore international waters and if they arrest us, we will use the opportunity to put Iceland on trial in the international forum of public opinion and we will bring the issue to the International Court of Justice and the European Parliament.

How are we going to intervene?

The plan is to physically block the harpoons using the strategy of aggressive non-violence. Is it dangerous? Yes, it’s dangerous and it is a risk we must take to protect these endangered, intelligent, self-aware sentient beings. We will not do anything that endangers the lives of any whalers.

We also will be producing a pilot for an on-going television production. Operation Paiakan is both an intervention and an educational campaign. We intend to call the show Neptune’s Navy.

The name Operation Paiakan was inspired by the hero whale, Payakan, in James Cameron’s awesome movie Avatar – The Way of Water. We could not reach Cameron to get permission to use the name, so we named the campaign in honor of Captain Watson’s late friend Chief Paulino Paiakan of the Kayapo nation of Amazonia. We believe that Cameron named his whale after Chief Paiakan, although we can’t say for certain.

Captain Paul Watson views the killing of a whale as murder.

A recent report commissioned in Iceland stated that at least 35% of the whales killed by Loftsson’s hunter boats died slowly and in extreme agony.

Kristján Loftsson is a Cetacean serial killer. He has murdered tens of thousands of whales since he began working on his father’s whaling ships at the age of 13.

Loftsson knows how serious and effective we are in protecting whales. We sank two of his whaling ships in 1986 (pictured) and he is well-aware of our effective campaigns against Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean.

With the ship at sea, we will have a ground support team in Iceland to watch the whaling station and the movement of the whaling ships. We will wait outside of Iceland’s territorial waters.

Our ship the John Paul DeJoria II is faster and stronger than Loftsson’s two remaining whaling ships, and we believe we are more passionate about saving whales than he is about killing them. To his crew of killers, it’s just a job. To us it’s a moral crusade. We stand for life and Loftsson stands for death.

Not only do we love whales, but we also don’t want ourselves or our children to live in a world without them.

Whales keep the Ocean alive by supplying nutrients to phytoplankton and because of the diminishment of whale populations, we have seen a 40% diminishment in phytoplankton in the sea since 1950.

Saving whales is about saving humanity and it is about recognizing that to evolve, humanity must exercise compassion and ecological common sense.

Since Captain Watson began defending whales in 1974, we have seen Australia, Chile, Spain, South Africa, Russia, South Korea, Chile and Peru end whaling. We have seen whaling restricted to the territorial waters of Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Japan. However, we must be prepared for Japan to return to the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in 2024 or 2025.

They are building a new $100 million dollar factory ship and there is only one purpose for such a ship, and that is for whaling in the waters around Antarctica.

Captain Watson has pledged his entire life to defending and protecting whales and it has been his lifelong ambition to eradicate the evil of whaling from the Ocean.

Within a few days, Loftsson’s killer boats will begin to prey on defenseless endangered Fin whales and as they begin to hunt whales…we will stop the whalers.

This will be the first campaign at sea for the Captain Paul Watson Foundation and we want to thank everyone who has generously supported the Foundation over the last year since we established the organization which now has a 501c3 charitable status.

Thank you to all our monthly donors. The monthly donation program Pirate Patron gives us security for operations and the stronger the monthly donor program, the stronger our navy will be. You can also fundraise for the Ocean by becoming a Force Multiplier.

All donations over $1,000 may receive a unique admiralty nautical chart from Operation Paiakan.

All donations over $2,000 may receive a chart and have their name engraved on a plaque in the wheelhouse of the John Paul DeJoria II. Please email [email protected] for more information about the charts or engraving options.

So, my friends, we are on our way and we are confident that we will be able to effectively intervene and interfere with Loftsson’s murderous ambitions.

For the Whales, the Ocean and the Future,

Captain Paul Watson Foundation