Whalers, beware -- the Ady Gil is hardly your typical environmental activist vessel.
It stretches about 80 feet in length, with a space-age, carbon-fiber tri-hull design and two foreboding fins shooting up from the deck. It's lightning-quick, holding the world powerboat record for circumnavigating the globe, as well as versatile, boasting an ability to sail under waves up to 23 feet tall.
"It looks like the kind of boat Batman would drive," quips Paul Watson, the Canadian environmental activist and founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Next month, the Society will depart for Antarctica to target Japanese whalers, aiming to stop what it says is an illegal harvesting of whales.
The new ship is a game-changer. The society's other, larger craft, the Steve Irwin, can do only 19 knots. It is able to chase down and harass the larger Japanese factory ship, the Nisshin Maru, but too slow for its three 23-knot harpoon boats. Cue the Gil, which can do a breakneck 50 knots, able to zip around harpoon and factory ships alike.
The Japanese don't take well to the treatment, and skirmishes have broken out in the past, more often involving stink bombs than bullets.
"The whole thing is to slow them down, to harass them, to chase them, to interfere with their operations," Watson, who was an early member of Greenpeace, told the Globe and Mail. "They've shot at us, thrown concussion grenades at us. ... We don't know what they're coming up with this year."
None of his largely volunteer crew has ever been hurt, but to be prepared, they've made a few changes to the Gil, painting it black and adding 1 ton of Kevlar armor to limit damage by Antarctic ice.
"Well, it makes it bulletproof, too," Watson says.
Formerly the Earthrace, the ship was built four years ago to break the circumnavigation record. Once that was accomplished, its captain, Pete Bethune, sold it to the society for about $1.4 million. The society unveiled it three weeks ago, renamed for the Hollywood businessman who donated two-thirds of its cost.
"It is the right tool to go out there in the rough seas and try to stop these low-life, money-hungry, lying 'researchers,' " Gil said in a statement distributed by SSCS.
It's the third active ship in the SSCS fleet, although many others have been used.
The Gil and Irwin will depart New Zealand on Dec. 7 on Operation Waltzing Matilda, a mission that will last as long as the ships' fuel does.
"Our objective is to literally sink the Japanese fleet -- economically. To bankrupt them, and we're doing pretty well on that. They haven't made a profit in three years," Watson said.
Among those cheering for the new ship will be Batman himself, or rather Christian Bale, who played the Caped Crusader in "The Dark Knight" and "Batman Begins" and sits on the SSCS board.
"I'm sure they (the Japanese) know about it," Watson says of the Gil. "I have no idea what they're going to think."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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