"Whale Wars" gets nasty

05 Jan 2010
"Whale Wars" gets Nasty

NOTE: The Klowne of the week (KOW) will be a new segment at the Klownehaus. The Crew of Whale Wars is this weeks recipient of the Golden Kow

Saw this footage today making its round on the web. My friends and I love to watch this show just to see how much of a train wreck the crew can be.
The only way I could see a reality show being more unintentionally funny is if Vh1 accidentally switched the girls from “For the Love of Ray Jay” with the girls from Frank the Entertainers “Basement Affair”

For those uninitiated, the show follows the exploits of the Sea Sheppard’s…a group of anti- whaling activists who go out every year in an effort to deter the Japanese whaling fleet. The “crew” of this ship is made up of the same kind of people who come home from their first semester away at college with Dreadlock, a standard freshmen issue Che Guevara shirt and want to convert to Socialism and Buddhism at the same time (worked out well in Tibet, eh?). Few of then have any maritime experience; a couple had never seen a whale in the wild. But I’m sure they make up for that with their enthusiasm and good intentions.

(Am the most salty guy myself? Not exactly, but I do spend between 15-20 hours a week from May thru November tuna fishing 25 miles off shore in a 20 foot boat. Sometimes less then 10 feet from 60ft humpback whales. So, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing out there)

On of my favorite parts about this show, is that other than chasing the Japanese boats around and annoying them, there’s not much else they do. This particular video looks like their typical propaganda stunt. The big bad Japanese ship “rams” the helpless little Sea Sheppard boat. The Sea Sheppard clowns probably ran out in front of them and thought…hey, there’s no way their going to run me over…THIS WILL BE OUR TIENAMEN SQUARE MOMENT!!!

Unfortunately for these geniuses, they forgot to consider that ships don’t have breaks. A boat the size of the Nushi Marin probably takes like ½ a mile to come to a full stop. And it’s not likely the most nimble vessel in the world, so if couldn’t exactly “swerve” to avoid contact. That’s probably why they were blasting them with the old water cannons. To get them to move. (I do love how they keep shooting at them even after they’ve hit. That must be so much fun for the guy running the water cannon)

One thing the try to do is throw stink bombs and some sort of acid that makes the deck slippery. I guess this is to deter the Japanese from going on deck and whaling, but lets stop for a minute and consider their weapons of choice…Stink Bombs and slippery stuff…

Really? Anyone ever spend anytime at see knows that a boat can already be a pretty horrific smelling place. Add in whale (literally) tons of whale carcass and you’ve got some working conditions that aren’t probably up to OSHA standards already. There’s a great book by Nathaniel Phil brick called. Into the Heart of the Sea about the Whaling Ship Essex where he describes the smell on board a whaling ship. I wish I could find the passage, but suffice it to say a little Febreeze isn’t going to do the trick.

And as for making the deck slippery, well, it’s a whale boat - in the arctic. There’s probably quite a bit of slippery stuff on deck already in the form of ICE and, oh, I don’t know, maybe whale blood?

Anyway. I just thought I’d pass along. I don’t think whaling is a good thing, but these jokers aren’t really helping their cause with anyone other than those people who already believe in them.

So what did we learn?

--Making the deck of a fishing vessel slippery and stinky isn’t really that much of a deterrent
--Big boats can’t stop. Get out of their way
--PETA is way better at publicity stunts
--Those Japanese game shows where everyone gets jacked up are starting to make a little more sense