Full interview with Pete Bethune

first question is the most obvious one how did your involvement with the C ship and movement and preventing Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean come about so back in 2006 we launched this bike call death race which was built to attempt that will record for circumnavigating the globe and a powerboat and we ran it on biodiesel fuel once we finished our sponsor obligation so we were just sort of only a way back to New Zealand we did a tour down the coast of Australia and one of the journalists at a press conference come and asked him he said what are you going to do now that you've finished the record nice I sort of just off the cuff I said I might take it to entire I could disrupt the Japanese whaling because that that staged whaling was sort of an issue in Australia and it started the speculation on a couple of Facebook pages about you know hey what about taking this this very cool boat it's race down as a sea Shepherd vessel and then there was some I got a call from Sea Shepherd and flew over to Friday Harbor and and met with them over there and we sort of hatched a plan that would see me sell the boat to either sea ship Atal one of these sponsors and the deal was old kept in it on that first campaign down to Antarctica and you know in six months later you know they were what's driving the boat down to Antarctica in a boat like earth race or I think it was renamed to the Rd Gill wasn't it after it was sold to a Hollywood investor yeah so these there was a guy called daddy Gill who was a he sort of was involved in movies and television and Los Angeles he put in a million dollars and then leased the boat for $1 a year to sea Shepherd so he's technically he owned it but it was to be used for sea Shepherd campaigns to disrupt whaling so the boat then got renamed daddy Gillman and that was it thereafter so we're talking about a fast boat aren't we yeah it had a top speed of 40 knots if you wanted to go really fast and we see it out right you could do 40 knots but that's not extraordinary these lots of boats can do a lot faster the amazing thing about race really was more the range we took it for example from from Portugal across the Atlantic through the Caribbean across the Pacific to Australia down that coast and all the way back to New Zealand on a single tank of fuel like this very few boats on the planet that can do that and especially not a small like my GU race already girl wasn't an amazingly efficient vessel and you know I think it was you know probably one of the best looking boats of all time if you if you pop that boat in front of a whole bunch of kids they would all want to come aboard and check it out so it was a very special boat in many ways and you know I do I do miss it today actually so what are your tactics when you're engaging with the Japanese whaling fleet what what advantages has Artie Gil got over them so the thing with addy girl was it was far so the the the harpoon vessels of which there's the ocean are number one and number two they were also the Shonan Marie which is their security vessel they have a top speed between 22 to 25 knots which were a big vessel is very fast Eddy girl while we're down there could easily do 30 so we will match fathom up until then when you look at the disruption that Greenpeace had done against the Japanese whalers and also Sea Shepherd don't always struggled keeping up with the harpoon vessels and he killed changed it and that we know how to vessel that could could keep track of the those much bigger vessels and could try and disrupt the actual harpooning operation you saw a little bit with some zodiac work but zodiac so tough and Antarctica getting getting beaten up limited range so we thought it was going to be a real game-changer in terms of disrupting that harpooning operation and the fact that it you know could stay down there for a long period of time was this very nimble edge or vessel that could swing in front of these big harpoon vessels and there was naughty stuff that was going on like we would engage like prop Fowler's and things like that to really disrupt their operations what's a prop fouler so it's a it's a rope with with bits of thing into woven and and some flights on the end and you would throw it out the boat and try and get it to engage and the propellers of these much bigger vessels as they went past it's not an easy thing to do you know you've got these big boats and you know what's probably the most hostile waters on earth and you know I saw other sea Shepherd vessels driving in front of them trying to drop this rope so they get schooled in the props and it was relatively unsuccessful when you look at it over the years you know it's very these reasons why and that technical design of those harpoon missiles why it's very hard but that was the goal and it certainly had made the Japanese lights pretty uncomfortable down there having to avoid these smaller boats in front of them all of the time so in the period of time that the article was operating around the the Japanese whaling ships do you think you did manage to make a difference yeah probably the key one was the the the best thing we could do down there was to engage with the Nisshin Maru which is the processing ship and block the slipway the slipway is like this ramp at the back of the boat so here is what happens a harpoon vessel goes out shoots a while in the wild ice they then tow it and they transfer it over to the Nisshin Maru and it gets pulled up the slip I on the stern if one of our vessels blocks a slip way then it's impossible for them traits for whales and there's been many examples where sea sherbet has blocked that slipway for you know up to a month or two and it's basically shut whaling down while that's happening and one of the key job role that we played in the 2010 campaign was we we needed to slow the vessel down the Nisshin Maru enough to allow one of our bigger vessels to come in and block that slipway and in fact that was what we had done in stopping the Nisshin Maru on January 6 but a little bit early may be generally forward we'd managed to do that and then you know I was a short time later we got we got ran over which you know then changed the entire campaign so in the lead-up to January 6th from the day of the collision there'd been some sparring going on between you and the Japanese fleet oh absolutely they've been doing plenty of sparring going on between us and the Japanese fleet and look it's really complicated down there a lot you've got Japan they believe it's perfectly legal what they're doing you've got various NGOs and governments believe it's illegal and technically what we did down there was illegal you're not allowed to go and deploy fowler's you're not allowed to go and get in the way of a vessel it's engaged and fishing for example they have right away over you so we're breaking the law in terms of disrupting their operations but we would also argued are breaking the law with what they do and so leading up to there we had certainly been disrupting their whaling operations as best we could and trying to prevent them from harpooning whales and trying all their bigger boats to catch up with them so you could say there was a little bit of blood bad blood between ourselves and especially the Schon and Maori which is the security vessel and you know that vessels job is to you know keep keep people like us away from the main fleet as a lay person to someone who isn't a sailor and hasn't been down in those waters what what are the things that I don't understand about the reality of being in the sub-antarctic the sub-antarctic is probably the toughest option on earth you just to get down that you're going through the the fifties and sixties which are notorious for destroying boats enormous waves I mean we had this one once world was well that came true one things were the way that's not it's not like a linear piece of water that's the same all the way along it varies and has ly sort of peaks and troughs and I remember I had this we had a semester of swell command probably 10 to 12 meters and I remember seeing one of these breaking waves and it broke about 100 meters in front of us and that the area of destruction of this way was like a football field and we were busy trying to navigate our way through these waters the fact that we were fast I mean that we could sidestep a lot of them but at night it's a different story and you sort of luck of the draw they're very vulnerable and Antarctica and then once you get down you know into the genuine Antarctic waters which typically starts at around 63 64 degrees south you know you've got icebergs to go dealing with you you let's say you suffer navigational difficulties or you you get disrupted in some way there's no support down there you know there might be a couple of tourist boats but for the most part you could be a week from having a rescue vessel come in and help me out so it's a very remote place lots of iceberg cold if you fall in the water people might last maybe 15 minutes before they don't you're in a big boat it's gonna take you half an hour to turn around and pick that person up so it is a very dangerous stretch of water and it's taken thousands of lives through history and all this is in your mind on the day of January the 6th when you're engaging with the Japanese fleet and and I don't know the responsibility the stress the tiredness the the the desire to get something done to make a difference tell me about how that day began what unfolded the previous day so January the fifth we had we knew we were getting close to the Nishimura we had some Intel from one of the tourist boats they send us pictures of the Nisshin Maru engaged in whaling so we knew they were really really close we had also started to pick up some most most vessels think they give off certain EMF signals so you might have for example and an engine management system or a piece of electronics they all have signatures and we started to pick up this clicking on a VHF radio so we knew they were boats that were you know probably within 40 or 50 miles we then had this intelligence came through here's the position of the Nisshin Maru and we had two vessels capable of intercepting that there was ourselves in the Bob Barker which was the other new sea Shepherd vessel so we're both heading to these coordinates no one slipped I don't think you can try and sleep but now we're all super excited because our goal even though we'd come across the Shonan Maru up to this our goal is to shut down their Nisshin Maru and I think got a set phone call saying that the Bob Barker had had found the Nisshin Maru and was following them and at this stage they're heading straight towards us so we got instructed to sit there and wait for the Bob Barker and Nishimoto reaches the in what happen was the Bob Barker sent out two of these small boats to try and slow the Nisshin Maru down but it didn't go very well and the Nisshin Maru got out of radar range of this vessel so we think they're still heading straight towards us but the the Bob Barker's about to lose contact with them and then ash and Mary can go quickly for a short period of time when I say quickly maybe 14 knots and that was slightly quicker than the Bob Barker so they've gradually got out of range so we then got to call if you come across the Nisshin Maru your job is to slow them down so that the Bob Barker can get right up close to them and in just making these calls just interrupt you for a second who's giving you these instructions so these were coming from both Paul Watson in from Chuck swifty was a captain of the Bob Barker so there was you know it's sort of a three-way conversation some of it was over email as well the set phone is not so reliable down here so so then the so I got the call you need to go on it if you've come across the Nisshin Maru slow them down and sure enough then we see the Nisshin Maru coming over the horizon and at this stage you know we've been I've been researching this boat for the last year and suddenly this behemoth comes up I think it's eight they are sometimes enormous vessel theory imposing craft up from there already seen as the shona maori very small boats and the Nisshin Maru comes towards us we then drop back to the Bob Barker they give us a prop fouler to try and slow this whistle down pick that up we go in front of the Nisshin Maru we've backwards and forwards drop this prop fell the Nisshin Marus stops and then they start again but just the sheer act of stopping such a big vessel it costs them several several nautical miles and then lay out the Bob Barker to get much closer and get back within radar range so in many ways our job was kind of done for the day and at this stage we're very low on fuel so we've been running down there for at least a month now and I think I had this stage probably about 200 litres of fuel if which and a boat my goose rice is only a couple of inches in the bottom of the tank so we pretty much had to stop but our job was done we slide the Nisshin Maru such at the Bob Barker caught up with it caught up with it and nothing I remember I instructed mer we the Bob Barker came past us and I went up on the on the horn of a thrice with the rest of my crew had means you're near Jason he was I put him onto drive and the rest of us win and wave the Bob Barker on something felt like you know hang job job well done see you're up on the deck of our D guild by now yeah in fact not on the date we were sort of up on what's called the horn which he's got these two horns that ventilate the engine bay so sort of above the rear deck erie really so we set up there and wave the Bob Barker crew on and then this is precision of harpoon boats so they you should marry number one comes past the in the ocean Morrow number two you should marry number three and then the fourth boat was this the Shonan marina - which is their security vessel and this is the one we've already had some run-ins with prior prior to this and as the boat comes up so we've got one engine at an idle in gear and that's moving us forward at about three or four knots the other engine is in idle as the show nomura comes so it's approaching us on our port side so we at this stage we just wave these other vessels on it comes up on our port side and they hit us with what's called an L red which is a military acoustic device and it sort of disorient should makes communication is very difficult it's extremely layout like it does and some people it makes you nauseous anyway they start hitting us with us and they start hitting us with their water cannons they've got some pretty powerful water cannons on that security vessel and as this is happening my guide driving Jason he looks out the window and he sees this vessel coming up on our port side behind us he starts moving to starboard and the trouble you have with the ADI Gil is for you to engage the rudders you really need to get some water over those if you're only doing three or four knots you you'll continue in the same to reach so you're not as maneuverable as you would be if you had both engines running and moving at a faster speed you correct great if the butts going faster you get more moving though the rudders and the boat is much more maneuverable so Jason what he does is he he puts the second engine in gear he puts the throttles on and he has the right up to tuneful to starboard say as we start moving forward the boat starts tuning but at the same time the Shonan Maru starts turning to starboard as well and they were doing I think according to the maritime means he'd report they were doing 18 knots at the stage we start off at about 3 to 4 I think we get up to about 6 knots but it was this much faster vessel beside us and and what actually happened was it actually got pushed over on on a couple of successive waves and I didn't know this at the time I just remember thinking you know holy crap this boat is gonna run aside sorry who got pushed over yours oh no so what happened was that show no merits it's a big vessel like 70 meters long and there was this a swell coming in that was sort heading them on the beam and as they so it sort of you saw them start to turn and then a wave sort of pushed them and it facilitated that turn and then a second wave on now you sort of sort over to Tunes it turned them quite considerably to starboard and you know they end up sort of hitting us probably about six or eight metres back in the vessel they basically came right down on top of the boat and you know when I look back at the video it looks quite slightly but at the time was just happen within seconds so you're not in the place where you would be making decisions as the captain about how to avoid them that's Jason who's on the controls so I'm I'm on the I'm on the horn with a radio and looking back on it if Jason had have put the engines in Reverse we probably would have avoided the collision he's made us cool like he's looked out the window and he's seen what's happening and he's made if you like an executive decision and he says our best thing is to accelerate and turn to starboard in hindsight if there had have been a different instruction given or he hadn't made a different decision then it could have been a different result certainly if he had gone under reverse but in the end I take responsibility like I'm the captain of the boat you couldn't radion with the L Reds but you know I still made the call to go on that upper deck and radio instructions I never told him to accelerate he made their decision but on the captain it's still my responsibility and that's okay okay so there's a point at which the collision becomes inevitable what does that feel like as you're watching the ship bearing down on you it's much bigger than you Oh terrifying given all you know I thought we were gonna be run completely over and we'd be bringing people back in body bags you know the shining are seven seven or eight hundred tonnes we're only 18 and you know I do the first wave that the Shona Mara came down on I remember thinking this is gonna be really really close but we're getting hit by water cannons we can't see because we've got water spraying in our faces and the cell red you know so there was there's an element of confusion going on as well and then you know I sense Jason starting to accelerate but us not turning at all and you know there's there's a point when the Shona Mara on that second wave we knew we all of us knew we were going to be we were going to be getting it so pretty much everyone at the same moment starts sliding off for the horns you know we were quite exposed up on the horns it so we start sliding down into the cockpit area and then this wave of water comes through so as that shown and Maru it came down on a wave on top of us and the bow sort of pushed our bow right under the water and as the bow broke off this wave of water swept through the boat and you see it in the video that all of them accrue lucky no one got swept off the back and you know we're all just clinging on for dear life as this as this wave swept over us and the shona Marie sort of goes past and you know eventually the you know the water cannon passes us and the LRAD moves on and so they're still firing the water cannon at you at this point yeah they continue firing the water cannon until they were well past us but the water cannons to be fear they they take a long time to move away or turn off so I suspect it was just they had them trained on us and it was gonna continue getting us for twenty seconds or even this is the disputed point isn't it and it's partly in the New Zealand maritime report it's partly in the the Japanese defense in court that either you allowed this collision to happen or didn't do enough to prevent the collision looking under maritime law the ADI Gill is this what's called the stand on this we have right of way the Shonan Maru is the overtaking vessel their obligation is to keep well clear and they're also once they get past the suit and overtaking point they now the portside vessel and they have an obligation to keep this under maritime law with a stand on vessel and have right of way but so sorry taken that view the showing tomorrow beers major responsibilities but the second point of it the captain of any bone if you if there's a close quarters encounter that that is about to happen you have the obligation to use all measures possible to avoid a collision the fact that where they stand on vessel doesn't absolve us of responsibility in this and so and I accept that but I also put the make the point our entire time down there we are in breach of maritime law we are disrupting a vessel that's engaged and technically what is a fishing operation and under maritime law that is illegal but our job is to go down there and disrupt them and certainly we were most effective at that and I I accept the maritime New Zealand we do bear some responsibility for the collision I think if if we had of simply kept clear of all the whaling vessels in our entire time in Antarctica there's no doubt no collision would have happened but would that have made taken Japan to the International Court of Justice would it have made the newspapers and radio and everyone go following the thing down there probably not sometimes your job as a tech activist is to create what I call a festering sore and for that sometimes laws are broken we'll get to that in one moment one more question about this though at that point it sounds to me from from listening to you that you don't believe the captain the Shonan Maru was trying to run you down there I had the discussion with the first officer on the show and marry me number two so I spend a month on that vessel going back to Japan and once they Joe I said to him I said what were you guys thinking when you turn to starboard and I took a few minutes to get it out of him and he basically conceded that if a very minor damage had have occurred to the bow of the earth race they knew it would be the end of our campaign and all he had to do was was was a little bump and I think it got exacerbated by those big vessels like the shown tomorrow number two its viet you can't put that on a dime at high speed like once you start turning this maybe 20 seconds before the vessel really starts to turn to starboard and so once the captain of the show Nomo realized it was going to be much worse than he may have anticipated it's too late for you to correct that vessel is going to take another ten to ten fifteen seconds and it's too long so looking back on it and having discussed that with the first officer I think they probably thought a little weak glancing blow off the bail wouldn't have been a bad thing and I believe it ended up much worse than what they had originally envisaged so you've got a boat with the nose off it missing to put it bluntly and in in non practical and non-professional terms the boats not about to sink what do you do next as captain of the ship after the boats been run over I remember worrying that what had happened to Jason I didn't really know how far back the damage was and at this stage I'm thinking you know boat might actually sing remember running inside the vessel and Jason's you know he sort of you know looking at me what he's supposed to do he I told him to put out a mayday call see he put the Mayday call out to the Bob Barker I remember going forward then and seeing this big gaping wound in the bow and all of our stuff going around me thinking you know like like we we might get really low in the water either way we have to get a life raft ready so we had a life raft and the hell near so we took it out the back and tied it off on the on the vessel ready to go then I went inside had made the radio call to the Bob Barker to launch their small boats and then just started a you know effectively a recovery operation whatever was going to happen we knew that the the vessels time in terms of engaging the Whalers was was done on that campaign so now it becomes a case of you know let's rescue all that that might be vulnerable on the boat and set up a program to to affect the salvage of the vessel and how did the ship sink how did the RT Girl sink so this is where it gets quite murky so that afternoon I got a call from we got a call from Paul Watson and he said if I see he said what's the status of the an eagle and I said well you know it's it's salvageable but it is severely damaged and he did sound me out about the possibility of scuttling the vessel and then the following day so the stage we're still thinking there's a recovery operation underway the following day the call came through from Paul Watson and the stages only there's only four of us privy to deceased myself poor Watson Chuck Swift and look van Horn who was the comms officer so Paul gives us the order he wants the vessel scuttle now keep in mind at the stage it's not my visa it's a sea Shepherd vessel as far as I'm concerned I've been ordered to scuttle it but he didn't want the crew to know and this is where when I look at the last ten years of my life this is the period that I am embarrassed about so I went into the boat that evening with Chuck Swift who was a captain of the Bob Barker and Luc Van Horn and we scheduled the vessel at this stage the vessel was salvageable you know it would have cost there's no doubt in your mind about no doubt number one I don't know I'd spoken with the designers buy set phone they'd said you know look you know bring it in and there was a recovery if it made to get the bow and then that got left here but the boat was definitely salvageable so it wasn't a practical decision to scuttle it it was to use your phrase earlier to help create that festering wound yeah you'd have to ask Paul Watson what his intention was I think the if you look at what was put in the public domain it was that we tried our best to salvage it but there was definitely not the case and that was transpired and okay a court case many years later that I think it'll took again Sea Shepherd where he won a substantial amount of money for the deliberate scuttling of his vessel but I think the vessel was rammed and destroyed maybe is more media worthy than the vessel is rammed and damaged there was the case that our job really was to try and disrupt the whales that's right our job was to disrupt the whaling with the Bob Barker getting tied up on a salvage mission of Eddie Gil that's going to take up maybe a week or three or four days for us to get it to the French base which was the initial plan and so maybe Watson made the call I want the Bob Barker to be going chasing the Whalers rather than taking this boat down to Antarctica and that still lift the question of who was who was going to sell which the boat but at this stage you know it's technically I looked on it as a sea Shepherd boat but it's actually owned by an eagle and that that's the dishonest but that I struggle with you know I went in under orders I scuttled the vessel and we were instructed to make it so that the sinking happens slowly so the rest of the Quran the Bob Barker they will think that they're doing their best to salvage this vessel meanwhile it's slowly sinking in the water because we open the seacocks and the hatches and all those things and it's pretty tough like you know this boat has been my life for at this stage six years you know I mortgaged my house I put every cent that wife and ironed into that vessel and to then be asked to go and deliberately scuttle it you know it was a very tough day and you're keeping the truth from your crew and keeping the truth from the crew not for long I was the following day after the scuttling I took my crew aside and I and I told them what did what had happened and you know then you know the sea Shepherd had a very strict policy in terms of who was allowed to say what to media and you know it's made very plain to me like you'd better keep this till you go to your grave or a plane to you by Paul Watson yeah yeah bye Paul Watson my stiffly so if you and the crew transferred to Paul Watson ship by this stage so we transferred to the Bob Barker motors which is not Paul Watson ship it was chuck Swift's and was it the Bob Barker that you then went from to board the Shonan Maru number two yes oh we're not first got on the Bob Barker I made a proposal to Paul Watson that that the goal was to to give you some background on this the ramming of the ADI Gill never made it on television in Japan it was a page for page five story in a few newspapers it made a tiny little ripple in media and yet and wished the media was the number one story and almost all Western outlets whaling and Japan was a real non-issue I'll give you an example it's a little bit like abortion in New Zealand people know it happens but it's not something you're going to discuss at the dinner table it's not something that's really put out in the public domain it happens people are aware of it but it's not it's not an issue that is under any debate whaling is the same in Japan no one discusses it and so you needed a follow-up event in order to maximize the publicity I wanted to take it take the fight to Japan somehow and my crew and joining the article they all agreed if we got a chance to get you aboard one of the whaling vessels they had all agreed to be able to do that now my vessel is gone in some ways it's freed me up to go doing that mission so I proposed it to chuck Swift he proposed it to Paul watts and ports and agreed and they didn't so we started running missions to try and get me aboard one of the vessels and at the stage we're being followed by the show America number two I've got a greater reason to board it they've run over my boat I'm gonna go on there and cheekily give them bill for three million dollars to for the repair of it but the goal is to go back to Japan as a prisoner and my belief was that in doing that Japanese media would finally give whaling in Japan some traction okay so you boarded the show no matter who number two how did you pick your way to the bridge presumably you went and found the captain so we made probably four or five attempts on the Bob Barker but they all failed they then transferred me and the rest of my crew to the Steve Irwin and we went back to Perth and the Steve Irwin refueled Paul Watson kept me on board with a specific goal of boarding the shown in merit number two and it kind of became one of the key missions and Animal Planet who were filming it they were all over the story in one stage they look to drop me onto the onto the boat by parachute which sort of agreed to my recipe Soniya your name tactic orders possibly go wrong so that we spent many many err on many days trying to figure out how to do it and after multiple attempts I concluded the only way to do it was at night during the day that the croutha shown tomorrow have these impulse guns at they shoot pepper spray emboss cans are normally used for crowd control and they you can hit an area the size of a tennis court and spray it completely so there are very intimidating weapon they've got anti boarding nets up the side they've got crew running around with big poles to go work and your worth and then along the side of these vessels are these anti boarding spikes great big steel spikes at the side so it's a very difficult vessel to board and in the day all their crew need to do is come and shoot you with pepper spray and that's you know you're all it's all over so I concluded it had to be done at night but that presents risk you know you're in these very dangerous waters and how do you get under the anti boarding spikes if you go on a Zodiac as soon as the boat rolls down you're gonna get your pontoons all poppin and you know then you're dead in the water there was one anti boarding spike missing and there every about two meters down the length of the boat so that meant there was a four meter gap and our finger jetski was three point six meters we could just slide between where there was this tiny gap and so myself and my engineer Larry we spent a long time trying to figure out you know this is the point trying to memorize where it is and figure out you know is it possible to do this if the waves are coming from this way how's it gonna work out so we spent a long time putting this machine together and in the end made the proposal term to pull Watson and also that you know then the crew of the Steve Steve Owen was born in the crew the Bob Barker was born and the Japanese are very weary like you probably get one crack at this the the jetski has an advantage it has a relatively small radar signature so we'll we a small blip on a radar but when you've got big swell and waves and Antarctica it's hidden amongst all the all the clutter and noise on your radar system so I remember thinking we do have a chance of the Sun I can't remember the time would have been like two in the morning whatever Larry and I we we we launched this jet ski and the Steve Irwin slows down temporarily we don't want it to look like the vessel stopped so it slows down temporarily accelerates back up as soon as our in the water so unless we've got three of us myself Larry driving I'm in the middle and then they talked me into taking this animal planet cameraman and he's done like five or six seasons of Deadliest Catch hardcore cameraman he kept his camera rolling for about 30 seconds and then put it away there was there was a last word you got and he said at one stage when he got back he said he says it's keyless I've even been in my life I just simply wanted to survive the night night Animal Planet doesn't pay me enough for this Soniya there's three of us on the jet ski and jet skis were three people are quite tricky and back then jet skis were smaller and we kept we kept kind of half tipping over once we got under speed it was it was much better and I got this cameraman basically to be kneeling on the stern of this jet ski keeping as low as he can I'm keeping nice and low and Larry's just trying to navigate these waves and there was a couple of meters of swell and probably about a half metre chop so it's not perfect conditions but it's about as good as you ever get in Antarctica and we knew of where the front was coming we had we had that night to do it or from about six o'clock next morning it would be much more difficult and so we we circled around behind the Steve ooh behind the show neo mariya number two and then pulled up alongside on the port side of it and I was trying to use him a night vision but we keep getting spray from the from the jet ski and the vessel up on it so that sort of end up being no good so I just had to basically use a little bit of a set of light there was but it was very difficult I mean Bellaire is he came and we couldn't see these anti boarding spikes like we we knew they were there but it was just this big black mess and Larry was trying to memorize where they were from the superstructure that he could see but anyway he pulls down and then you know I think one of them one of the boarding spikes hits Larry and then he backed away and he came back in and then a couple times we smacked under the shone and Maori number two and you know it's jet skis pretty fragile but anyway he's at once so he has his job is to get me close enough and say when he's happy for me to go so he says go and I remember clambering up on the side of this thing and the I managed to get so my feet were on on the lower deck level and I'm clinging onto the site trying to get hold of something and this the vessel rolled down a swell and this wave comes up in and swept me off so now I'm in the water and and the jet ski carries on and so but you know and suddenly everything goes quiet aside you see that as the shona mario disappears often the distance and so I'm sitting there waiting and I've got a flyer on me so I can see the fly off all the chrome the Steve of enough Leah goes off the missions over but I don't to do that because in their missions aborted so I'm sitting there waiting and waiting and waiting and Larry what he's done this is the only found this out later he saw me board but he never heard me call him on the radio to say they're not successfully boarded so he didn't see me fallen so he's waiting for the call waiting for the call and if we call nothing happens so he says one of two things has happened Pete's radios damaged or he can't make the call as one or the sick thing as he fell on if he's fallen and I better go and pick him up and if he's on the boat they my missions successful in any case so all he does is he's following back along he can see with a little bit of light he's following the trial and he said nixing there I was like six feet in front I remember him he just came over this wave and then there was this jetski whoa clambered back on made a second attempt and on the second attempt which should be the same thing happened I got on the side clinging on this boarding net as the boat rolled into the swell I fall out clinging on to this net but it didn't roll so far and the wave only came up maybe to about my knee level and then as the vessel came back upright I pulled the knife out of my and I had a knife sort of tied onto my car I pulled the knife out cut the boarding net and jumped on a vessel and I remember sitting down I was worried the crew had hooded me but I remember thinking I crouched down and sort of very dark I remember thinking like we have made a little bit of history here I knew we'd created history all right you know I don't know how it's gonna play out from here but it was one of the most satisfying feelings I've ever had in my life we'd spent a month trying to make this happen and not an easy thing to achieve and you know as a team we'd managed to pull it off and in many ways I was the lucky guy in the forefront of this of this quite Deering mission and hindsight Lucky's a word possibly not the one I do you suppose you get taken to Japan you're arrested on five charges I believe you get put inside a maximum security prison what's a day in a Japanese maximum-security prison like maximum-security prisons pretty difficult really the good thing is you're you're in your cell twenty three and a half hours a day you have half an hour per day and an exercise yard and then Monday and Thursday you have a shower bath and that's sort of a sort of like a group sitting there's four baths you go on there you get under the shower which is like three feet off the ground you sort of squat down and get clean until the guards are satisfied you're clean enough they give you a nod you jump in the bath and you get I think it was like nine minutes in total to do that and so the the the food is horrible you know it's like every meal I call it miso but it's basically cabbage soup boiled veggies maybe it's a very small piece of first or a little bit of meat Thursday night was curry night I remember the first I made on this curry it was just congresso like restaurants cutting out all the bristle bits and so I'm looking for this chicken and putting the gristle aside at the end of it he's no chicken is just gristle you know I lost a lot of weight and Japanese prison a lot of weight I think I come in I was like 61 kilos I'm 75 normally lost a lot of weight very angry place a lot of Angry Men a lot of broken men was you in physical danger there was a few times in a couple times and I think guys were lining me up Prison is a funny place you you can't become an actor trouble in prison no one misses on at the top you've got very violent offenders you're coozer no one misses with the empty on the bottom as you sort of what you can maybe drug addicts kids old men no one bothers here troubles always in the middle area and a prison and I saw plenty of horrible stuff and sort of wondering whether my time would come up and hot end up getting smacked up I saw they the guards on the floor won't touch every time this trouble there was this group of 25 I called them the stormtroopers but it was a group of 25 guards and they would run in unison all dressed in black and armed with them tasers and pepper spray and all sorts of stuff so if there's any trouble the floor goes and lockdown it takes two minutes for these the stormtroopers to arrive on the floor and they would deal with whatever miss it was and so it didn't take AB longer sorted out but if you got taken by those guys like it's a bad situation you're in and on you know I'm just trying to keep my nose clean here it was there was a couple funny things that that helped me one was the Japanese by the stage they're all over the store and I remember my first night in prison I'm the lead story and sorry and I sort of heard this and I'm pretending I'm a tough guy and in no way am i I'm not violent I'm not tough I make no claims or anything like that and I'm pretending that if anyone messes with me I'm going to rip the head off that's the only only the lead item on the news is was my wrist and my placement in prison so I put my my arms up browser that's me that's me so I'm pretending on this tough guy and it makes security prison there you're not allowed to speak so prison there is definitely quite until these if there's a fight or there's any violence or anything like that then people all Ellen until the fight is over soon as the fights over back to being definitely quiet I've got in trouble with the guards because you know I started speaking or yelling more to the point in a few times you know I saw guys got taken away because they couldn't stop yelling at night there was a couple drug addicts and the prison near and you get two warnings third warning the storm troopers come in and take you away and deal to you so I found I found prison a very difficult place and I think for the first three or four months probably okay but the last month I definitely struggled and I came out a different person and not not all for the better by the time your trial is underway the sea Shepherd organization have distanced themselves from you they claim that was tactics later is that correct no when they distance themselves from me it was detrimental to my case and they said I'd taken a banned weapon to Antarctica it wasn't a band we panned Paul watts and had given me permission to take it this was the Bowen houses the bow and arrow and what happened while I was while I was in prison while wars as an animal planet TV show is airing in the US and this is episode where it's got me and my crew practicing the bow and arrow on the back deck of how'd he kill Paul Watson puts in a press statement saying that people Yoon was he took a beam weapon to Antarctica he's been expelled from sea shipping and that well I quite literally broke my heart I never I never found out until one of the lawyers turns up and he said I by the way you know Sea Shepherd's expelled you just so you know and it hurt my case you know the and you know my lawyers been a long time trying to figure out what our response would be to this what do we what do we say in the in that came up they said the best we can do is sort of say that it guarantees that Pete Bethune won't be going to enter a door again but my lawyers certainly were most uncomfortable about what had happened over the my expulsion from Sea Shepherd but I think at the same time what happened was there was a big backlash and especially in America and he's he's the sky and prison on your behalf he's taking a bow narrow who cares whalers have got explosive harpoons they've got 12-gauge shotguns all of the sea Shepherd vessels carry shotguns that steve-o and had 50 Cal for a while but the ins got a barn era who cares and so there was this big backlash against them and I think what they decided was to to sort of stop the blood leading they came back and said ah we just did it to assist people with use court case but it didn't help me so when you called them liars you meant and it wasn't a tactic yeah it wasn't it wasn't a tactic I think in hindsight they just did them they did the best they could under the circumstances and poor Watson made the call that booting me out was the best tactic but then with with all the the venom that was being put on Facebook about it they then after I got out he sort of apologized and said I was always a technic on you that wasn't the case but I was willing to forgive and forget and move on I mean I still loved the organisation and I'm still pretty determined to contribute against Japanese whaling and so I sort of said to Paul look you know it doesn't matter let's move on but in the you know it was probably the start of the end of my involvement were see but I distanced myself from them about four or five months later and when I came clean about what had happened to the early kill you were potentially facing 15 years in a Japanese prison you got two years and I'm slightly unclear about Japanese law here depending on which news report Audrey do either admitted or pleaded guilty to to four of the five charges what was the actual case so under the Japanese judicial system is very difficult if they charge you or something you will be found guilty there's no two ways about the conviction rate is almost 99 percent the prosecutors charged me with five things which included assault and the assault was a fabrication there's no way I assaulted anyone and this goes back to one of the tactics that Sea Shepherd had was to shoot rotten butter onto the deck of the Nisshin Maru or onto the Dix of other vessels so on this day I was ordered to go and shoot this rotten butter onto the Shonan Maru number two as we pull up to it the guys are there with the pepper spray and I fire one of these rotten butter things out of a potato gun all right and it hits up by the by the helm at around the same time the two security guys on the back of this boat they shoot these impulse guns at us but they shoot them forward and under the breeze and as the boats boats moving forward this cloud of pepper spray comes back over them and so those two guys all got hit with their own pepper spray they put a press release out saying that it was me shooting the rotten butter that had caused the injury so then when I get back to Japan the four charges they lay against me I don't care like position of a knife I needed a knife to cut the net boarding a boat without permission I don't mine disruption of business and Antarctica waters there was it was my doing there you know I got I got no problem with it destruction of property I did cut a net to board the vessel so those four charges I'm fine with but the the assault charge was was a fabrication and and the the it's very hard when you're in court and there was they there was four Japanese were interviewed the three guys who sustained injuries from shooting themselves and then there was also the captain of the Shonan Maru they're all standing there and I remember one of the questions placed each for them was what do you think should have happened to captain Bethune all four of them said they should be punished to the maximum level of the law it was a translation that I got and it's pretty hard to sit there and watch that and it's only right that once the Japanese have charged me with those four things plus the assault charge my lawyers are saying like you will be found guilty and I'm determined I want to plead not guilty so we came up with sort of a compromise and part of it was that we would sort of say why why the whaling was wrong and we would argue my case but I would also apologize and I think this is where my lawyers probably did a good job Mike I only have influence here over the convict the what the sentences I'm going to be found guilty but am i sentenced to six months two years five years fifteen years whatever I have a degree of control over there by how much I apologize and how much contrition I show so my lawyers are sort of saying like like don't don't get too stressed over the pleading not guilty but will argue your case and say that you don't believe it was you but you're also going to apologize and I didn't like the apologizing but leading up to this my lawyers are saying you're going to get two to five years you'd better prepare your family for this and on so this is where it's starting to get dark for me I thought I'd do a couple of weeks and I've now done three months when lawyers are telling me I'm gonna be doing two to five years they ran my boat over all I did was board their boat without permission so I'm thinking things are getting a little bit unfair you see you've miscalculated a little bit yeah but you know at this stage I'm still thinking like like if I get out of here soon I'll be okay but if I end up doing two to five years that is a really unfair system so anyway I said to my lawyers I said you know how can we make this better and they said there's nothing you can do I said what about if I speak in court and I don't have to speak in court as soon as I start speaking I could open myself up to being interrogated by the other lawyers and you can you can easily dig a hole and especially when you're in in a country with another language so I said to my lawyers what what's the best thing I don't they said you just need to trust us and I said I want to speak in court and the lawyers initially resisted it for about a week and eventually I said what about if I give you what I want to say you put it in Japanese and I will learn phonetically so they finally agreed to this so I wrote out what I wanted to say and was very aggressive and my lawyers are sort of saying you know you need to show contrition none of this joyce contrition here so what they did was they very cleverly rewrote it in in a very japanese kind of way that it sort of said you know this is why whaling is important to new zealand and australia is why they think it's wrong I never meant to hurt anyone and I apologized profusely in those things as always I think it was about 12 minutes that I memorized and its entirety it's very hard when you're in prison that you're not allowed to speak to but I spent you know it took me about a month to get it and I and when it finally turned up in court I remember getting up there and speaking it in on the whole I did a really good job like I'm a good orator if I need to make a speech or something I can learn it and I can deliver and I knew the words that I had to accentuate on you the words that I could speak very very softly and my lawyers afterwards they said that was a turning point in the case they said the fact everyone believed that I was fluent Japanese at the states all I've done is Luna learned 12 minutes of Japanese but Andy you and your lawyers think that was why you got a suspended sentence yeah there was no deal done no it wasn't a deal made by the New Zealand government or CCI between you to not go to the Southern Ocean anymore and you would get a suspend it was there was never any deal and the embassy staff they made that very clear to me they said look you know this is it this is a foreign judicial system we have no influence our job is to turn up to the court case and ensure you get a fair trial but we have no influence so there was there was never any deal done it was various people have said that there was a deal done of me not going back to Antarctica that wasn't the case is it possible that there were things going on in the background that you didn't know about because our government was playing it very straight bet it may have been possible that the New Zealand government had spoken to the Japanese government but I don't believe so I wouldn't rule it out entirely Japan is a very independent judicial system and I don't think there was any interference but I could be wrong and John Key might come out in a few years or so on by the way people would you know I didn't have a word and they did have a word to the judges but if would you look at it I don't think I wouldn't you call them lapdogs of the Japanese yeah I was pretty scary they've got me every bit of trouble they're coming I see become like a fat little lap dog to the to the Japanese and certainly John Key took exception to that there's an odd thing here though there was a news report that your wife Sharon said before the sentence was handed down and that it was a suspended sentence that you were so confident of getting a suspended sentence that you were planning a party back in Auckland that weekend how could you be so confident I don't think I was but I am an optimist and I remember keep in mind that the from when I give my my speech to when sentencing is handed down that's a month period and so there was a lot of time for media to I just what had happened and through that time the lawyer started to say like the we think you might actually get a suspended sentence and keep in mind and I think probably the key to that was certainly my speech was very apologetic and had a great degree of contrition and my law so to say you might be lucky and I was all of the way through my case I never thought I'd do five months at any stage always thinking you know I'm gonna be out in a week and then that week something I could be out in three weeks I'll be out in five I was always trying to look on the bright side and so I remember thinking leading up to when the sentence was handed down I mean was sort of thinking like I am gonna be going back I didn't know but I you know tried convincing myself that it was a good chance more lawyers at the stage has said you know you may end up with two to five years or it may be suspended they thought it unlikely I'd get less than two oh sorry they thought it I'd either get suspended or I'd get somewhere between two and five years but they did say that the speech I gave where I showed a lot of contrition that that helped our case enormously nearly eight years later Japan is back in the southern waters and whaling again did you lose the war here's one of the things that happen I was at about the four-month stage a journalist from The Japan Times tuned up and so on and after and you're still in prison at this point I'm still in prison this Japanese journalist tuned up and she held a press release up against the glass petition and it said it announced that Australia was taking Japan to the International Court of Justice over their illegal whaling she said it you know have you got a communist I remember I just broke down in tears at the time and I sit in a fragile state by them but also I realize the significance of it so in many ways 2010 was the tipping point in terms of public opinion about Japanese whaling it was the year that New Zealand really woke up to Japanese whaling Australia there was there was a massive protest while I was in prison and it forced the Australian government to announcing court action now New Zealand at the stage hadn't gone along with it that was why I the New Zealand government these fat little lap dogs to the Japanese because we'd basically abandon Australia's called action but I believed it was the right thing to do and then something I think about a year later the key government announced they were joining Australia in the court action I went to the to the court case and also to the when the verdict was handed down Japan lost the case so it took four years for that time Japan lost the case and the International Court of Justice said that their whaling was illegal and it was a breach of the IWC and it was a breach of international law Japan then withdrew from Antarctica for a year they then brought in a new so-called scientific whaling program which has a quota of 333 whales as opposed to a thousand one of the things I learned as a conservationist you said you celebrate your victories because they are few and far between and to see the Japanese quota go from a thousand down to 333 there is a fact yes but they doubled the space of the ocean in which they're able to take those whales from like I say you may have won a better which was the ICJ court decision did you lose the war the war is still going and I would argue the case the fact that they've doubled the area they've still chopped their quota down by 2/3 I see there as a victory but it's not the total victory I would like and conservation is a tough game you have to play a long game in it and I think there will come a time when Japan will withdraw from whaling in Antarctica it might be another five years or ten years or 20 years you've got to remember to 2010 there was a significant drop and whale consumption in Japan and I was the lucky guy in the middle of making that happen not only me it was a fact it was the first time the Japanese realized this is percent off Kiwis and Aussies no one in Japan had any idea that that was the case it was the first time medium Japan ever discussed whaling is an issue and it put it in the public domain and then you started seeing some intellectuals coming out and questioning and it's saying should we continue doing this there was debate in Parliament over it so it made it an issue in Japan and wasn't a total victory but while consumption has dropped this is one of the reasons I think the Japanese they don't need to take if they are some whales anymore because they can't sell them and you know I was part of sort of making that happen as was your number of other NGOs and individuals who also work towards it but Japan it's a very tough country to influence oh we have the same as you now over things like we've been working trying to stop Pangolin smuggling and and rhino horn trafficking these various things for a little white boy from New Zealand to influence 1.5 billion Chinese it's very tough you got to play a long game on these things and the same applies to Japanese whaling maybe five years maybe 10 years maybe 20 years might come to a halt what could usually be doing or rather what shouldn't you zealand be doing now to help bring that about i would love to see the new zealand government send a patrol boat and follow those whalers right around Antarctica you did see that many years ago there was an australian coast guard vessel that followed them around and you know see ship but having withdrawn from from activities in antarctica send a new zealand patrol boat down there go and do some monitoring of the tooth fishery it's the world we still need there's no one going down there now remember when we were there there was there were so many illegal long lines set for to fish you know it's New Zealand's backyard in some ways we claim it we're issuing quota for the harvesting of toothfish and Antarctica we have an obligation to see in patrol boats down there I think we should send one down there and use it to go monitoring the Japanese whaling and put that footage and those those photos around the world what's a part of the story you've never been able to tell before that you'd really like to say I think the but I spoke about the what really happened over the sinking you know there's very little of that in the public domain I think there and I'm embarrassed for my role and all then you know the rest of its been told a few times and but you know those were those were dark days I mean when I when I came back so when I got back to New Zealand after Japan and immigration they took me into a into a room where all my family and friends were before I sort of merged into the media scrum an awesome miss and first thing I did was I polluted here what had happened happened over there over the sinking of the an eagle like you know I was part of part of a what was a pretty dishonest act really and you know it was quite a few months later that I apologized and he Gill and came clean about it but I'm pretty embarrassed about my role and all that I can argue at the time under a lot of stress I took the order and followed orders but at the end of it you know I said captain of the vessel and I still went along with it I think it was probably the wrong thing to do you know if I was in a similar situation again on pain look quite differently I would hope and I you know the I paid a heavy price for what I did remember I got back home I had no money and I called up a friend of mine and lanta if I ever get in real trouble he'll loan me some money or help me out and I called him up and he said he sent 10 grand over to me to just tied me and Sharon over and I went down to the bank on the Monday and the ten green wasn't in the account and I remember looking at this this little wee bank teller and I was looking at how far away she was from me whether I could grab her throat you know that's that's where you'd gotten to that's not in my nature you know president Japan had changed me and not all for the better and you know I struggled concentrating I was trying to write a book and I just couldn't concentrate or anything you know I've I was quite a mess and hindsight probably had some degree of PTSD or other things going on and there were very difficult times for me and but as I look at it you know I'm really proud of the role I played it wasn't just me it was a sea Shepherd team there was Greenpeace and tens of thousands of people played a role protesting and many other things and I was in many ways the lucky guy on or the middle of that but I did pay a price for it and when I look at things today I'm uncomfortable with everything I did except for the scuttling that was the wrong thing to do but the rest of it I did the best I could and it's not a total victory but you know we will try our best be with you and thank you very much Thanks [Music]

Channel: RNZ

Views: 4,067

Rating: 4.7260275 out of 5

Keywords: RNZ, Radio NZ, Radio New Zealand, Pete Bethune, Sea Shepherd, whaling, conservation

Id: ynecStOsoto

Length: 60min 34sec (3634 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 04 2018