Greenpeace was launched in 1971, in Vancouver BC, to stop a US nuclear bomb test in Alaska. Over that decade its success prompted the establishment of Greenpeace offices all over two continents. An overarching international organization was started in Europe in the late 70s, by David McTaggart, also from Vancouver.
In 1972 and 1973 McT had sailed a 38-foot wooden ketch, the Vega, into Moruroa Atoll in the South Pacific, where France conducted atmospheric tests of nuclear bombs. In ’72 the French navy rammed the Vega, and in ’73 they boarded the sailboat, beat crew members, seized the vessel, and jailed the protesters. It became an embarrassment for France, especially after their claims of a peaceful arrest were disproven by photos of their attack, taken on the sly. David later sold the Vega to fund legal efforts to hold France accountable for both the assault, and the nuclear destruction.
In 1980 McTaggart was the chairman of Greenpeace International. The French were still using their Polynesian colony for nuclear testing, and David wanted the Vega back. It was sitting in decay in a moorage in Lake Union, Seattle. McT purchased the boat, and recruited Kay Treakle, who had no marine experience, to get the Vega ready for a return to Moruroa.
After a ton of research, Kay had the Vega towed to the Olympic Peninsula, to Port Townsend, which was a center of wooden boat culture in the Salish Sea. She hired Melanie Johnson to oversee the overhaul of the Vega. When the boat was seaworthy, McTaggart sent a Dutch sailor he’d met to deliver the vessel to San Francisco, where it’d be prepared to sail to New Zealand, and then back to Moruroa.
Not all of McTaggart’s recruits were as capable as Kay. The Dutch skipper, an endlessly cheerful guy, brought along a local navigator from Port Townsend, who was using old-school navigation: dead reckoning. Use charts, note your speed, direction, currents and the wind, and plot an estimation of your location to get from A to B. Kay and I, who’d never been on the open ocean in a sailboat, came along for the delivery. We knew nothing. And got seasick, to boot.
After recovering, there was no land in sight, as we followed the coast, on our way south. Or so we thought. After a couple of days sailing, while looking for Cape Mendocino, an open-ocean tug came over the horizon, motored towards us, and gave us a case of beer, which apparently is what you do if you encounter someone on the high seas. We were also informed of our true location: many hundreds of miles off the coast, and way off course.
There is a correction to compass readings that navigators make to account for a deviation produced by magnetism in the earth’s crust. It’s called the declination. At our location it was something like 21 degrees, which local sailors would subtract from their compass reading to determine their true direction of travel. Our navigator instead added it to the bearing. So we were 42 degrees off course, which took us deep into the open ocean. The captain never checked the navigator’s plot of our course.
Not quite freak-out time. The Vega is a worthy vessel, and we have some agency. Kay told the skipper to head due east until we picked up the coast. But having screwed up, and badly wanting to be captain of the Vega when it sailed to Polynesia, he talked her out of it so he could make up lost time by sailing directly to San Francisco. This is hard. If you are completely dependent on someone who has a skill set which you lack, how do you proceed, even after they’ve fucked up? Oh well, we’ve all made mistakes…
We encountered the coast at night, seeing lights on the shore under a heavy cloud cover. The Dutch captain and the navigator proudly proclaimed we’d reached Marin County. They even claimed to be able to see lights on Mt. Tamalpais, and San Francisco Bay was just on the other side. I could see maybe 20 lights ashore, and it looked like a fishing village to me. But Kay had the definitive observation. “Y’know, you’d expect that a city as big as San Francisco would cast a lot of light on the undersides of those clouds at night. And I see nothing.” The clouds were all dark. And when we approached, it was indeed a small town.
That’s when we got scared. It’s one thing to make a simple error. It’s entirely another to be so inept that you project non-existent geographic features onto an empty landscape. It’s harrowing to be dependent on someone who is delusional. So what do you do?
Kay’s response was to confront the captain, and demand that he explain, and justify every subsequent decision he made. It was a slow and painful additional day and a half, following every buoy and navigational bell, using their cadence and charts to identify our location amid the islands approaching the Bay. The captain totally focused on the task, since he knew every step was being scrutinized.
When we docked downtown, Kay told the captain and navigator to go get breakfast. And we walked down the dock to greet Alan Thornton, the campaign coordinator, who was wondering why we were two days late. She immediately said “Fire that idiot, and don’t let him anywhere near the Vega”. Which is exactly what happened.
