Word: boated
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...where France plans to test nuclear bombs. Light wind. Half-moon. Waves from a far-off storm swell under La Rebaude, a broken-engined, radio-dead ketch owned by Greenpeace. The crew hands two black-painted sea kayaks over the rail. They are then tethered to a Zodiac inflatable boat already pitching in the water...
...plan is, if the two infiltrators are about to be captured at sea or on the beach, they will fire a parachute flare to signal their comrades on La Rebaude. There is no flare. The lights of a French patrol boat appear to the north, at the 12-mile limit. It motors to within 300 yds. of La Rebaude, showing its presence. Then it falls away...
...ketch, La Rebaude had sailed from Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, at midnight 11 days earlier, without clearance from the French, and rendezvoused with the two kayakers at sea a few miles down the island's coast. Greenpeace bought the boat somewhat casually at dockside in Papeete and equipped it in four days, without sea testing and without including a long-range radio transmitter or receiver. (The diesel engine died four hours into the voyage, so the vessel also lacked electric power, except a little generated by solar panels, and thus had no functioning refrigerator or electric bilge pump...
During the long night watches as they sailed to Mururoa, La Rebaude's hands told Greenpeace stories, many of which shared the same moral: "The military lies. Corporations lie. We don't lie." Twilly Cannon, from Missoula, Montana, the boat's captain, endured months in 1990 stalking the Soviet navy as it prepared to ditch another spent nuclear reactor in the Kara Sea northeast of Murmansk. Michelle Sheather, an Australian, was on the Rainbow Warrior when the French blew it up, and had left the ship 15 minutes before the limpet mines went...
...hours after dropping off Whiting and Baker, La Rebaude reaches a flotilla of protest boats at a spot in the open blue ocean--139.05 degrees W, 22.30 degrees S--about 15 miles off Mururoa. One-masters and two-masters crowd the site; the Manutea, a Greenpeace boat carrying journalists, heaves into view. French picket boats motor slowly at the line of the exclusion zone. A French jet labeled MARINE mock-strafes the boats one by one, diving from about 1,000 ft. to not more than 150 ft., then rising and diving again. Military helicopters buzz about, low enough...