Word: ketch
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...South Pacific atoll of Mururoa last week to preside over a new round of underground nuclear tests. Accompanying him were Defense Minister Paul Quilès and a 21-member party of parliamentarians and journalists. Hours before the blast, officials announced that the French navy had seized the Vega, a ketch owned by the Greenpeace environmental organization, after the protest ship had entered French territorial waters near the test site. By week's end the four crew members were being taken to a nearby atoll and were awaiting expulsion...
...sailboat, it has often been said, is a hole in the water into which one pours money. Weekend sailors joke that boat is an acronym for Bring Out Another Thousand. A used 18-ft. sloop can cost $10,000, while a new 36-ft. two-masted ketch can run $100,000 and up. And then there's the maintenance and the commitment to sail from a single port. Sailing courses, however, free their students from these costs and limitations. That's because U.S. certifications are accepted in most ports around the country and the world. Graduates can use their certification...
Nearing 1 a.m., Sunday, Sept. 3., just beyond the French navy's 12-mile exclusion zone at Mururoa, the South Pacific atoll 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...
...Baker, 31, a veteran Greenpeace activist, starts the Zodiac's 15-h.p. motor, and Matthew Whiting climbs aboard from the ketch. Whiting, 36, is lately of the French Foreign Legion; for that matter, he is lately also of the British army, the Spanish Foreign Legion and the University of Hertfordshire, where he studies literature. The two men, both British, carry green fatigues in waterproof bags. They have short haircuts. Whiting, burly, with a broken nose, speaks fluent rough-and-tumble French that he learned in the legion while serving on Mururoa. Baker, a lean, hard mountain climber with a seen...
...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...