MENDOCINO CO., 3/17/25 – The whales are coming to the Mendocino Coast this month, but it might not have turned out this way.
On Saturday a panel of local activists in the Mendocino Whale Wars gathered to tell their stories at the Kelley House Museum in Mendocino. The event, jointly sponsored by the Museum and the Noyo Center for Marine Science, drew a full house to hear about how the whale population was nearly decimated by Japanese and Russian whaling fleets in the 1960s and 1970s. The Whale Wars led to the launch of the Mendocino Whale Festival in 1976 to educate the public about the whales’ plight. The festival has continued ever since.
The catalyst for the Whale Wars was footage taken by a Greenpeace patrol boat challenging Russian boats killing sperm whales off Cape Mendocino in 1975. Activists using an inflatable Zodiac put themselves between the whalers and the whales, resulting in national press coverage of a harpoon flying over the men’s heads and hitting its target. Mendocino sculptor Byrd Baker saw the footage and helped organize a protest movement that included boycotting Japanese and Russian products and the delivery of over 100,000 letters of protest to the Russian embassy.
The initial activism led directly to the creation of the Mendocino Whale War Association and the launching of the Mendocino Whale Festival. The panelists at the Kelley all spoke of the sense of mission that the early organizers felt.
Panelist Sally Welty remembered that the first whale festival consisted of education and an auction to raise money for more challenges to whalers. The festival was meant “to expose people to the truth about whales – how magnificent they were and how at risk.”
Barry Cusick showed the audience a graph charting the extraordinary numbers of whales killed – over 80,000 per year in the 1960s — and compared the killing of whales during that time to the massive logging of old-growth redwoods.
Heidi Cusick Dickerson remembered that the entire town was inspired to support the boycott because “the whales could not wait any longer.”
For Lee Welty, the Whale War experience was the first time he saw the power of people coming together to fight for a common goal – a process that he called a “constant struggle.”
Panelist Shana Hadley, granddaughter of local artist J.D. Mayhew, is working to preserve the legacy of her grandfather, one of the original activists who used his art to convey a “Save the Whales” message and, along with Baker, Nicholas Wilson and John Griffith, continued to challenge whalers using Zodiacs. Mayhew even created a “Russian Defector’s Survival Kit” – a pair of blue jeans, a bottle of vodka and a Playboy magazine displayed in a painted cabinet with a glass front.
The Integrational Whaling Commission (IWC) imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. Katherina Audley of the Noyo Center for Marine Science has studied whale populations all over the world and reported “the numbers are coming up,” with an estimated 2000-plus blue whales off the California Coast and humpbacks and gray whales seen under the Golden Gate Bridge. The fight is not over, however, as Norway and Iceland allow whaling up to a quota. Japan has left the IWC and continues to engage in commercial whaling, as do some indigenous populations.
A pop-up exhibit with photos, clippings, and other memorabilia celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Whale Wars is on display at the Kelley House Museum through March. More information about the Whale War history is available at the Museum’s website.
The Noyo Center for Marine Science website lists upcoming whale festival events, including a Zoom talk on “Five New Discoveries About Orcas” on March 16 at 6 pm.