My esteemed colleague, Capt. Fran, sends from the Southern Latitudes:
The Sea Shepherd ship, Steve Irwin, is tied up behind us here in Hobart. These guys go around and purposefully ram other ships under the guise of “saving the whales”. Well, last night I was having a couple of beers with some of my shipmates when we saw that a bunch of Sea Shepherd crew were drinking at the table next to us. One of their crewmembers came over and sat down and started chatting with us. (Let me put a note in here that at no time during the course of the entire evening were voices raised in anger.) Anyway, this woman, named Zin, was actually quite nice and handled my questions well, although not to my satisfaction.
None of their crew are professional sailors; they are all just young idealists that have no idea the danger their captain is putting them in. They have no basic safety training, no survival training, hell, they don’t know how to tie a bowline, let alone how to put on an immersion suit. They have no idea of what the sea is really about. And they ram ships in the Antarctic.
So, when the Captain showed up, the crew all started acting a bit Stepford-esque, and clearly he has some personal charisma working for him. My suspicion, which I shared with him, is that he has a bit of a cult-like following and uses his charisma to get these young idealists to come work for him for free. And since they trust him implicitly (think Reverend Jones in Guyana), they don’t think twice about what type of danger they might be in.
He said he explains the danger to them and that each person has to sign a contract that essentially says that they understand and would be willing to die for the cause. WTF? That is where the “Shame on you, sir. Shame on you.” sentence might have been uttered. The conversation went on from there, but suffice to say that he now knows that I consider him to be a pompous and arrogant man that really only cares about satisfying his own egomaniacal needs, and cares nothing about the lives of the people on the ships that he endangers, or about the welfare of the crew that so blindingly trusts him to keep them safe.
And to reiterate, voices were never raised in anger, but clearly we did not part as friends.