Last year, we talked to Captain Paul Watson about his five months in a Greenland jail — the latest brush with the law in his 50-year battle against whaling nations, including an ongoing standoff with Japan.
Watson was an early Greenpeace member before founding Sea Shepherd in 1977, and in 2012 became only the second person, after Jacques Cousteau, to receive the Jules Verne Award. He left Sea Shepherd in 2022 to start the Captain Paul Watson Foundation.
Last month, his ship, the Bandero, was boarded by armed Icelandic forces and confiscated after disrupting an attempt by Kristján Loftsson — Iceland’s richest man — to kill 150 whales under a government license. Watson wasn’t onboard, but was directing the operation, and is now fighting to get the boat back. We caught up with the captain.
Where are you at following the Greenland arrest, made by Interpol on behalf of the Japanese government?
In July 2025, Interpol dismissed the red notice against me as politically motivated by Japan. I thought that was the end of it. Then in November I went to the climate conference in Brazil. I was invited to speak, ironically, by the Brazilian Federal Police and Interpol and two days after arriving, they called to say Japan wanted me detained and extradited.
The Brazilian government told me Japan had submitted the request in English, and they weren’t even going to look at it unless it came in Portuguese. Meanwhile, we got a habeas corpus from a judge, and a letter from President Lula saying not to worry. But it showed me Japan is still pushing for a unilateral extradition.
I won’t go to Japan, but everywhere else is now less of a concern — I don’t trust the Icelanders, Danes, or Greenlanders. We work with Sea Shepherd France and Brazil; the other Sea Shepherd groups abandoned our principles, but those two are still on track.
Your expulsion from Sea Shepherd, the group you founded, clearly still rankles
I’m a director with the Brazil and France chapters, carrying on the strategy and principles the other groups abandoned. I guess they wanted to go mainstream. I told them there were plenty of mainstream groups already, like Oceana. We were supposed to be unique.
What got to me is the people who pushed me out, whom I’d known for 20 years. I promoted them all the way up, and they illegally dismissed me. A Dutch court ruled it illegal, but nothing happened. That’s the way of the world. People stab you in the back.
Before I left, they offered me $300,000 a year to be a figurehead: no talking, no lectures, no press. I wasn’t doing that. That’s why we started the Captain Paul Watson Foundation. It’s the same mission; defend marine life through direct action.
And that’s what was playing out in Iceland?
In June we launched Operation 86, returning to Iceland to intervene against Loftsson’s illegal whaling. After about a month, we engaged — took the boat inside the 12-mile limit and encountered the Hvalur 9, which we chased back to port. That triggered a full-scale coast guard response: a large ship, three small boats, a helicopter, an aircraft, and troops rappelling onto our deck. They boarded us in body armour, masks, and guns, seized the vessel, and towed it to Reykjavík. The crew were detained, though not formally arrested.
They confiscated our laptops, phones, and cameras without a warrant, and interrogated the crew without lawyers present. We brought in a lawyer immediately, and it turned out they’d broken several laws doing it. The crew were deported without charge, while the ship stayed — and Loftsson filed a civil suit for the whales he didn’t catch because of our intervention. The ship is still being held in Iceland.
He sounds like a villain from a Bond movie.
He doesn’t even kill these whales for money. H e loses one to two million dollars a year on it. There’s no market; the meat sits in warehouses because Japan won’t buy it. He’s tried ridiculous schemes to shift it — whale-testicle beer for tourists, and whale-oil iron supplements aimed at Africans with iron-deficient diets. As if people who can’t afford food are going to buy iron tablets.
Why does he keep doing it?
He’s 82 and loves killing whales; it’s been his whole life. His father was a whaler too. He’s just a stubborn old man, a modern-day Captain Ahab. The previous government handed him a five-year license to kill 150 whales. We estimate our action stopped half of then being killed.
Related: “Surfers Have a Powerful Activist Base”: An Exclusive Conversation with Captain Paul Watson
It all sounds absurd.
We’ve seen some genuinely absurd things. The whalers make a spectacle of ripping fetuses from pregnant females and displaying them. We also have footage of one whaler grabbing the penis of a dead whale — about six feet long — while the others stand around singing the Icelandic national anthem.
Captain Paul Watson Foundation
Will you get the ship back?
The ships are expendable. If we lose it, we lose it — but we’ll fight to get it back. We risk the ship, our freedom; our crew risk their lives. Nobody was hurt this time, and nothing was damaged. We’ll keep fighting for the boat, and keep disrupting these whaling operations. The fight is never over.
And what is next?
I’m very excited about being a featured speaker at the upcoming Ohana Festival in Dana Point in late September, which was co-founded by Kelly Slater, who you may have heard of, and Eddie Vedder. It’s the 10th year of the festival, and there’s great music and great storytellers, so I’d ask all surfers to get tickets and come down for a conversation.
Related: Anti-Whaling Activist Paul Watson Released From Greenland Jail