|
I yam what I yam >> Ryan Young goes from the 'burbs to the high seas aboard Paul Watson's Sea Shepherd by PHILIP PREVILLE
"One of our biggest jobs was equipping the ship with water cannons to fend off law enforcement parties like the RCMP," Young explains. "We were trying out various second-hand engines to get maximum water pressure. Once, the Canadian Coast Guard directed its own water cannon into our exhaust, seized the engine, caught up with us and boarded us. So we were prepared to use the same thing on the Coast Guard." That other great peril of piracy, ramming, also required precautionary measures. "These are called can openers," Young says, pointing to photos of massive steel spikes that protrude from his ship's hull. "They're built with hydraulics and can come out another six feet. If another ship decided to ram us, these would cut open their hull."
All this, yet Young and his mates didn't even engage in any high-seas skullduggery. But that's what you get when you board the Sea Shepherd, the ship of hated environmentalist Paul Watson, to sail the Gulf of St. Lawrence in search of seal hunters. The Greenpeace founder and current president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS), Watson now spends his days saving whales by sailing into the harpoon's path, or chasing fishing vessels off the Grand Banks, or--as was the case this time--climbing atop ice floes and getting between seal hunters and those cute, fluffy white pups. He's also been known to sink the odd ship or two in his hardcore Dr. Doolittle crusade to save the animals. >>> It's actually quite the racket Watson's got going. Last year, Watson invited Young to risk his life by joining him aboard the Sea Shepherd. Young accepted. But since the SSCS is a non-profit organization, Young had to come up with $5,000 to pay for his meals and accommodation on board the ship. And once on board, he was promptly put to work. "I was only able to raise about $2,500, but the SSCS agreed to pay for my room and board in the end." In exchange, Young spent the month of February in port near Myrtle Beach getting the 160-foot Sea Shepherd rigged for a month at sea. Watson regularly recruits younger and more enthusiastic supporters to serve aboard his ship, which makes for an unusually inexperienced crew of misfits. Young's 12 mates included fellow Montreal-area native Martin Fuller, two American women, a British animal-rights activist and one veteran seaman, a Scotsman named Simon Clarke, who served as the Sea Shepherd's engineer. Watson makes a calculated trade-off, exchanging skill for loyalty: as believers in the cause, they never question his orders and will work like dogs, provided they get over some basic hurdles like seasickness. "I had no trouble getting my sea legs," says Young. "Even in really bad weather on the way back, we had two or three days of 40-foot waves and sea spray crashing into the windows of the bridge and seeping through the walls, and it didn't bother me. Martin had a real problem with seasickness, and probably won't ever do it again." As a reward for his seaworthiness, Young says he was given the best unskilled-labour job on any boat: cook. "I still had to do other work, but I would skip out early to prepare the meals, so it broke up the monotony. And down in the kitchen there was a bottle of port that only I had access to, so I would have a nip every now and again." This being a ship of animal-rights activists, vegetable stirfries were on the menu virtually every day. "There was meat on board, but that was mainly for the engineer--he's Scottish, so all he eats is meat. Simon would make bacon and butter sandwiches--butter caked one-third of an inch thick, with bacon, in a sandwich." Predictably, small mutinies erupted in the mess hall. "Some of the vegans were like Nazis when it came to that sort of thing. I respect vegans--Martin's a vegan--but sometimes they go a little to far." >>> When you think about it, Young says, it makes little sense to try to live the perfectly ethical life when you're working for a pirate captain who's perfectly willing to kill reputations, destroy private property and resort to other unethical means of fighting for his own beliefs. Young says Watson is a far more congenial man than the rabid crusader who is often presented in the media: pleasant, knowledgeable, genuinely funny. And, he insists, Watson is very ethically-minded about his crew and his own outlaw status: for their own protection, crew members were kept informed only on a need-to-know basis. "A lot of information was hidden from us. That's because Paul is worried about infiltrators, but also because if something clandestine is planned, he won't make us accessories. He's protecting us from the law." This year, however, high-seas action was hard to come by. The ice had broken up early, so conditions for sealing were bad. They found only one sealing vessel and couldn't get close enough to intervene. "We had two huge Coast Guard ships following us around everywhere, and they would send out helicopters to do low-level flights over the ship every two to three hours. And we were approaching that one sealing vessel, they turned, faced right at us and started barrelling through the ice." Young intends to return to the Sea Shepherd in the fall, and may even spend the next few years at sea with Watson. But would he sink a ship? "If I answer that, the government will open a file on me right away." They probably already have.
|
After all was said and done, Ryan Young, a carrot-topped 26 year old from Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, spent only two months living on a ship, and only one month sailing the high seas. But that's all it took to turn him into a hardened pirate.
And, like all pirates, you have to be prepared to run like hell. "The ship has a bow thruster, which is a retractable engine in the front of the boat that can go into the water and come out. It's really important for manoeuvrability--you can turn on a dime with that second engine if someone is coming towards you."