Men's Journal

Captain Paul Watson has not mellowed with age. A wildlife advocate who left Greenpeace in 1977 because it wasn’t radical enough, Watson sails under his own Jolly Roger, and claims to have sunk eight whaling ships as a self-appointed, vigilante enforcer of a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. For his trouble, he has been accused of being a terrorist by three sovereign nations. This fall, he brings his seafaring brand of monkey-wrenching to Animal Planet with his new show, Whale Wars .

interviewed by Peter Heller

How do you sink a whaling ship?

In port. We go into the engine room, open up the salt water-cooling systems, and flood the engine room to sink them.

Haven’t you used limpet mines on the hulls?

In the Sierra, the Isba I and Isba II.  They were sunk by military people who used limpet mines.  We make sure nobody’s on the ships.  We’ve never hurt or killed anyone.

How do you justify your extreme methods?

Japanese whalers are targeting endangered whales in a sanctuary in violation of a moratorium. We chase them; as long as they’re running, they aren’t killing whales.

You claim you were shot by the whalers.
They had military personnel onboard with rifles. I was out on the bridge wing when a bullet hit my bulletproof vest, then hit my medal, and the pin stuck in my chest.

The whalers say the story is fabricated.

A doctor onboard checked it out right away. I did an interview on camera right before, then right after there’s a bullet hole in my Mustang suit, and the badge was dented. It would’ve been quite a feat to engineer.

Was your campaign successful?

They got zero endangered fin whales and only 583 of their planned 935 minke whales — about a 50 percent loss.

This article originally appeared in the November issue of Men’s Journal.