A fire pump rigged on the stern of the African Queen is used to block the view of Toshi-maru harpooner.

Onboard the M/V Arctic Sunrise

Day Sixty-two - 8 January 2000

"Wall of Water"

Yesterday, the Japanese whaling fleet used their fire hoses to successfully stymie our efforts to shut down their illegal hunt. Then they spent the night trying to get as far away from the M/V Arctic Sunrise as possible.

When we caught up to them this afternoon, we knew we would have to come up with something good to shut them down for the rest of the day. We decided to mount a portable fire pump to the back of the inflatable now known as the African Queen. We tested it and found that it shot a vertical spray of water eight meters into the air. Would this spray of water sufficiently block the vision of the harpooner and thus prevent him from aiming at whales?

We were about to find out. Curtis positioned the African Queen in front of the Toshi-maru with the spray shooting up in front of the harpoon.

"For something we hadn't really planned in advance it looked really good…professional. The spray had them buggered. There were four whalers up at the bow looking down, and you could see them thinking 'Hey, where's all that water coming from?'."

The spray did seem to confound the whalers. They had no chance of killing anything with a stream of water blocking the harpooner's vision.

The four Japanese crewmembers at the bow retreated inside long enough to get their wet weather gear. They returned with fire hoses much more powerful then the little one on the African Queen. While the Greenpeacers avoided using their fire pump to directly spray the crew of the Toshi-maru, the Japanese crew members did not hesitate to train their hoses directly onto the African Queen, soaking the crew thoroughly.

Still, the African Queen stayed in position, sometimes dodging around the bow of Toshi-maru to gain a reprieve from the spray, but always returning to the front before the whalers could even think of resuming their hunt. From the bridge of the Sunrise we saw another catcher approaching.

The Greenpeace inflatables zipped back and forth between the two Japanese whaling ships, confounding the whaling crews and diverting them from their illegal hunt.

Our second engineer Aaron was crew on the African Queen. "We stopped two catcher boats for two and a half hours. I'm pretty happy with that," he said.

We could also see the Yushin-maru off in the distance. We couldn't tell what it was up to - it might have been working its way through an ice pack - but it was clearly not bringing any whales to the factory ship.

By 6:30 all the whalers were back inside their ships. They had obviously given up for the day. The whole fleet had been shut down. Our crew was jubilant. By 7:40, the wet but successful Greenpeace boat crews were safely back on board the Arctic Sunrise - enjoying a tasty supper of shepherds' pie.