In a historic campaign, Greenpeace Foundation and Earthtrust jointly purchased the world’s first fully owned anti-whaling campaign ship. It was a 176′ WWII submarine chase ship with twin turbocharged diesels, conceived to intercept and outspeed the Soviet whaling fleets wherever in the Pacific they could be found. Its maiden voyage in 1977 was aided by fuel contributed by GP San Francisco and zodiacs from GP Oregon (both now defunct). Film documentation was provided by ABC’s Wide World of Sports: it was the first network documentary coverage of the growing anti-whaling movement.

The ship, named the Ohana Kai (Hawaiian for “family of the Sea”) was the fastest vessel for the whales, ever. With an integral helicopter pad, and crane for launching its 8 large zodiacs, it represented a new step in escalating the anti-whaling fight. Its target: the two huge, rusting Soviet factory ships which plied the waters of the North Pacific. These floating factories would drag the bodies of immature sperm whales aboard for “processing”, taken from the many accompanying harpoon-equipped “killer” ships which had chased and killed them. The Ohana Kai had been specifically bought with one additional sober thought in mind: if whaling could not be halted by the eye of the camera, our ship was exactly the right size to jam up the 550-foot factory ship’s maw by ramming up the slipway at high speed. This was a serious campaign for high stakes.

The ’77 voyage was directed by Paul Spong and captained by George Korotva, both veterans of previous protests; Paul was the scientist who got the Greenpeace movement involved in the whaling issue in 1975.

In a dramatic confrontation 1800 miles north of Hawaii, the Ohana Kai intercepted the factory ship Dalniy Vostok taking on supplies, and by maintaining a presence, buzzing it with helicopter and zodiacs, managed to keep its contingent of 12 “killer” harpoon ships from returning to process whales. The whaling of an entire Soviet killer-fleet was shut down for the first time, and the campaign became one of the first internationally-broadcast documentaries on the need to end whaling.

In the most dramatic visual event of the standoff, the Ohana Kai campaigners actually boarded the Dalniy Vostok, taking zodiacs up the slipway into the stench that had claimed so many whales, and climbing to the blood-soaked wooden decks. The campaigners – including Spong, Dexter Cate, and others – knew they could face gunfire, imprisonment, or other retaliation for this uninvited boarding. They carried Greenpeace Foundation’s Russian-language literature describing the environmental need to end whaling, which they handed out to the captain and crew during tense interchanges. The crew was not unaware of the fact that only illegally small whales were being taken. In fact, from data that was only released after the fall of the USSR, we now know that these fleets were then engaged in also taking huge numbers of endangered whales such as humpbacks, in an illegal conspiracy with Japan, which consumed them and lied about it at the IWC. A Japanese “observer” was aboard, supposedly to make sure that IWC quotas were followed; though we now know it was part of a corrupt plot by the two nations to decimate the world’s whales. Clearly, the glare of publicity was to them like garlic to vampires.

As many whales as were saved by shutting down the Dalniy Vostok for a week, many more were saved by the resulting publicity, which fed the growing international call for an end to whaling.

After a successful tour of campaigning, the Ohana Kai finally became a floating anti-whaling museum in San Francisco Harbor and was retired in the mid-’80’s. Greenpeace Foundation will always honor its memory – while vowing to never again buy and maintain such a vessel, which cost nearly a half-million 1977 dollars to purchase and operate.

The USA’s oldest and original Greenpeace, proudly unaffiliated with Greenpeace USA