A Crew Member’s Personal Account from our Anti-Whaling Campaign in Iceland

📁 Archive Document — Historical Record

This article was first published when our charity's original name/branding as 'Sea Shepherd UK' prior to our name change on 18th May 2023 following the removal of Captain Paul Watson from Sea Shepherd entities worldwide (with the exception of the UK, France and Brazil).

Captain Paul Watson remains a member of our Board, and our charity continues to uphold its founding principles of non-violent direct action marine conservation.

This article and its contents are the property of the 'Captain Paul Watson Foundation UK' and forms part of our 21 year history.

Learn more at paulwatsonfoundation.uk/new-name

Thanks to the support of people like you, our volunteer crew are on the frontlines in Iceland as part of Operation Northern Exposure for the entire whaling season — June through September — working around the clock to capture the horrific images and share livestreamed videos of the slaughter so the world can see what is happening. This is a first-person account, with photos, from Ky Trickett, a volunteer and master's student in journalism from Bournemouth, England.

Volunteer Ky Trickett at the whaling station in Iceland.

Iceland really is a magical and enchanting country straight from the pages of mythology. It is a shame that this visage is broken by the quite literal actions of one man. Kristján Loftsson is a Machiavellian character, CEO of the last commercial whaling operation in Iceland. His licence to hunt fin whales expires in 2023, and he is exploiting that until the very last moments. His goal is to kill at least 140 fin whales (though he could kill up to 210) — a vulnerable species facing many other threats to their survival in addition to Loftsson's grenade-tipped harpoons.

A harpooned fin whale being pulled up the slipway for butchering.

It is surreal seeing the second largest mammal in the world monstrously ripped from their home and butchered. After witnessing over 30 whales be taken from the ocean and pulled into Loftsson's diabolical factory, we begin to disassociate from the horror, but cannot forget that these cetaceans are extremely intelligent and divine creatures. These photos may not translate the real colossal size of the whales. My childlike mind cannot escape the comparison to Geppetto in Pinocchio being swallowed whole. Watching as each one gets winched up the whaling station's slipway like a massive extra-terrestrial being delivered to be dissected in the open air — it is the smell that always brings this nightmare back to a reality. The smell is indescribable and sticks to your clothes and skin, even though we are outside the fencing surrounding the horror.

The work to document and expose this is really exhausting. It involves near-constant energy from the crew and non-stop surveillance. We are only a small crew in Iceland, all taking shifts to watch the Hvalfjörður (Icelandic for 'Whale Fjord'); when a ship is spotted, the crew all muster — sometimes after having only just gone to sleep, and sometimes with no sleep at all. Our mission is to document with cameras and livestream the often six-hour-long process to butcher each whale. Often enough, Loftsson's ships return with two whales and the process takes well over 12 hours — an exhausting but rewarding mission. It is all worth it to expose this injustice to our own world. The oceans are the lungs and the heart of our planet, and cetaceans play a crucial role in regulating their health. In a world where we are more conscious than ever of protecting our environment through climate change and deforestation, how we allow acts of pure greed like this to exist baffles me.