Operation 86: Forty Years of Fighting Icelandic Whaling
- Robert Read
- 5 hours ago
- 8 min read
Operation 86 is the latest chapter in a fight that began forty years ago.
For our UK team, however, this campaign on the ground began in 2018.
Operation 86 is not simply a campaign to show the world that whales are being killed. It is a campaign to gather evidence, expose violations and force action.
Since 2018, our UK team — first as Sea Shepherd UK and today as Captain Paul Watson Foundation UK — has returned to Iceland whenever Hvalur’s harpoons have returned to sea.
Our mission on land is not simply to film content for social media.
We document the story of every whale.
Every body brought back to the station. Every unborn calf discovered inside a pregnant female. Every visible harpoon wound that may tell us something about what happened at sea.
We photograph and map those wounds to understand where the harpoons entered the body, how many times a whale may have been struck and, where possible, what that evidence can tell us about the circumstances of its death and the suffering it may have endured.
Each whale becomes an individual case.
Not simply another number added to the total.
Every observation is photographed, filmed, dated, timed and preserved.
When we identify a suspected breach of Icelandic animal-welfare regulations, pollution laws or other applicable rules, the work does not stop when the footage is published online.
We compile the evidence.
We submit it directly to the relevant Icelandic authorities.
We report suspected animal-welfare violations to the Food and Veterinary Authority, MAST, and, where necessary, to the police or environmental authorities.
Then we follow up and demand that those reports are investigated.
Our footage may ultimately reach millions of people through social media and the press.
But for our land team, it is evidence first and content second.
A campaign that began in 2018
In 2018, our team documented an entire Icelandic fin-whaling season from land for the first time.
One hundred and forty-six whales were killed, including two later identified as rare blue-fin hybrids.
When the hunt returned in 2022, so did we.
Another 148 fin whales were killed that season.
That year, we expanded the campaign beyond the shoreline.
While our land team continued documenting every whale returned to the station, a chartered vessel followed and tracked the whaling fleet at sea.
We recorded whales showing evidence of multiple harpoon strikes, suspected pollution incidents and possible breaches of Icelandic regulations.
Official monitoring by MAST later confirmed the scale of the animal-welfare problem.
Thirty-six of the 148 whales killed in 2022 had been shot more than once. Some were struck three or four times.
One monitored whale took almost an hour to die.
Another took approximately two hours.
That case became particularly important in what followed.
Our evidence did not remain in a camera or disappear into a social-media feed.
It was published.
It was reported.
It was submitted directly to the authorities and covered extensively in Icelandic and international media.
Combined with official veterinary findings and growing public pressure, the evidence made the cruelty of the hunt increasingly difficult to ignore.
In 2023, the Icelandic government suspended the beginning of the whaling season on animal-welfare grounds.
When hunting was eventually permitted to resume, stronger regulations and greater monitoring had been introduced.
Only 24 fin whales were killed during that shortened season.
No fin whales were killed by Hvalur in 2024 or 2025.
We do not claim that our work acted alone.
It did not.
Icelandic campaigners, scientists, journalists, veterinary experts, organisations and members of the public all played a role in increasing scrutiny of the industry.
But we are confident that years of documentation, formal reporting, international exposure and sustained public pressure contributed to the stronger scrutiny and regulations that followed.
In 2026, the harpoons returned
After two years without a Hvalur hunt, the harpoons returned to sea in 2026.
And so did we.
This year, our long-running UK land campaign was joined at sea by Bandero and the international crew of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation.
These were two distinct teams operating on two complementary fronts.
The international Foundation and Bandero confronted and monitored the whaling operation at sea.
Our UK team remained on land, continuing the investigation and evidence-gathering work that began in 2018.
Bandero’s presence also gave our land watch a new operational purpose.
Before Bandero joined the campaign, we did not need to track every departure in order to guide another vessel towards the whaling fleet.
Now we did.
When Hvalur 8 or Hvalur 9 left harbour, our team recorded which vessel departed, the exact time, its direction and its last confirmed position while it remained visible from land.
That information could then be relayed to Bandero.
Our volunteers slept in shifts. Sometimes they barely slept at all.
Someone always needed to be awake, watching the harbour and ready to alert the rest of the team.
Missing one departure could make it much harder to locate the whaling fleet once it reached open water.
Missing one return could mean losing crucial evidence about the whale being brought back.
That was the work happening behind many of the photographs and videos people saw during this campaign.
From 27 whales to 41
As of 27 July, our team had documented the deaths of 27 fin whales.
At almost the same point in 2022, 54 fin whales had already been killed.
Exactly twice as many.
That was significant.
We believe several factors contributed to the slower pace.
Hvalur was operating under stronger regulations and greater scrutiny than it had faced previously.
Every whale it returned with could be documented.
Every suspected breach could become a formal report.
And every whaling vessel leaving harbour now had to consider the possibility that it could be challenged or followed at sea.
But the killing continued.
By 10 August 2026, 41 fin whales had been killed.
Among them were pregnant females.
We also documented whales showing evidence of multiple harpoon strikes.
For us, those observations are not side notes to the campaign.
They are the campaign.
Because a total of 41 can hide what happened to the individuals inside it.
A whale showing evidence of more than one strike.
A pregnant female and the unborn calf she was carrying.
A wound showing where a harpoon entered the body.
A carcass arriving at Hvalfjörður that only hours earlier had been a living animal in the North Atlantic.
Our job is to preserve that evidence and make sure those deaths cannot simply disappear into the season’s statistics.
Bandero changes the campaign
Bandero has made a difference as using the intelligence gathered over previous years by CPWF UK - the Bandero was able to block the Harpoon ships from the largest concentrations of fin whales in the western whaling grounds thereby ensuring Kristjan Loftsson's target of 140+ fin whales looks to be unachievable
The situation escalated on 30 July while Bandero was following Hvalur 9.
Icelandic authorities intervened.
Bandero was boarded by the Icelandic Coast Guard and police. Crew members were detained and the vessel was subsequently taken to Reykjavík.
The images travelled quickly around the world.
An armed boarding of a conservation vessel naturally attracted international attention, and for several days much of the media focus shifted towards Bandero, its crew and the response of the Icelandic authorities.
But we have tried to keep returning to one basic fact.
Bandero was there because fin whales were being killed.
The campaign was never about creating a confrontation with the Icelandic Coast Guard.
It was about confronting commercial whaling.
Every report about Bandero therefore raised another obvious question:
Why was the vessel following Hvalur 9 in the first place?
The answer brought the story straight back to Iceland’s fin-whaling industry.
The attempt to stop Bandero ultimately placed even more international attention on the activity it had gone there to expose.
One operation, two fronts
It is important to understand Operation 86 as more than the actions of one ship.
Bandero was one part of it.
The land investigation was another.
At sea, the international crew could follow Hvalur beyond the horizon and place direct pressure on the hunting operation.
On land, our UK crew documented the consequences when the ships returned.
The two roles were different, but they reinforced each other.
Bandero created pressure beyond the horizon.
Our UK team created accountability when the whalers returned.
And behind both sat years of evidence gathering, reporting, media work and pressure on the authorities.
This is what Operation 86 became in 2026:
a chain connecting what happened at sea with what arrived back at Hvalfjörður.
Our role and our fundraising support the UK campaign: the land team, documentation, evidence gathering, reporting, communications and the work required to investigate and expose Icelandic whaling.
What happens to the evidence now?
At the time of publishing, CPWF UK does not currently have a crew on the ground in Iceland, But the end of this phase of the land deployment does not mean the end of the work generated by it.
The photographs, footage, records and reports collected during Operation 86 remain.
They must be reviewed and archived.
Potential violations must be followed up.
Evidence must continue to be placed in front of the relevant authorities.
Material must be supplied to journalists.
While our land crew has withdrawn, we leave Hvalur hf's whaling operations remain under the watchful eye of activists : 1000whales.com , hvalavinir.is, hardtoport.org , lastwhalingstation.com, whale watching companies, journalists and videographers living or working in Iceland, who more than ever are working hard to draw attention, and opposition to the cruel fin whale hunt.
What happened during the 2026 season must remain part of the political and public discussion around the future of Icelandic whaling.
This has always been the less visible half of our work.
A camera can record something in a fraction of a second.
Using that image effectively can take months or even years.
Evidence gathered during previous campaigns continued to have consequences long after our teams returned home.
The 2022 campaign is the clearest example.
What was documented during those weeks became part of a much wider body of evidence showing serious welfare failures within Icelandic fin whaling.
By the following year, the beginning of the season had been suspended.
That is why we document everything.
Because we do not know which whale, which wound, which piece of footage or which official report may eventually become impossible for the authorities to ignore.
Why we continue asking for support
Captain Paul Watson Foundation UK’s role in Operation 86 has been the land campaign.
Maintaining that operation for weeks requires accommodation, transport, food, protective equipment, cameras, communication tools and volunteers prepared to spend nights watching an apparently empty harbour because a whaling ship might leave at 3am.
That is what your support helped make possible.
The visible part of the campaign may happen on a cliff overlooking Hvalfjörður, but a large part of our work happens before and afterwards.
Forty-one whales too many
At the end of a campaign, it is easy to measure success in media coverage, reports submitted, videos watched or pressure created.
Those things matter.
But there is another number that matters more.
As of 10 August, 41 fin whales have been killed.
Forty-one individual animals.That means we cannot describe Operation 86 simply as a victory.What we can say is that Hvalur did not operate unseen.
We were there when the ships left.
We were there when they returned.
We documented the whales.
We documented the wounds.
We documented pregnant females.
We reported what we found.
The campaign followed the whalers to sea.
And when Icelandic authorities intervened against Bandero, the resulting international attention placed an even greater spotlight on Icelandic commercial whaling.
Operation 86 is the latest chapter in a fight that began forty years ago.
In 1986, the International Whaling Commission’s moratorium on commercial whaling came into effect.
Four decades later, Kristján Loftsson’s ships are still firing explosive harpoons into fin whales.
So the work is not finished.
We will continue to investigate.
We will continue to document.
We will continue to report.
And we will continue pushing for what should have happened a long time ago:
the permanent end of commercial fin whaling in Iceland.
Please support Captain Paul Watson Foundation UK and help us continue that work.
Keep the pressure on. Help us make 2026 Iceland’s final whaling season.
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