Chris Robinson, 1951 – 2008
(Originally posted by Brian Fitzgerald from Greenpeace International)
Chris Robinson died of cancer a few hours ago at the age of 57.
Chris was a salty dog, a Greenpeace activist who spent his life on the sea, one of the original Rainbow Warrior crew and later captain of the Vega.
I find it hard to believe he’s gone. He was the guy who could sail through anything — from Pacific typhoons to Mediterranean storms in which the tiny Vega was doing 11 knots on bare poles. He ran inflatable boats under radioactive waste barrels being dumped in the sea. He challenged the French military again and again by sailing into their self-declared “exclusion zone” around the Pacific nuclear weapons test site at Moruroa. He went up against war machines and trident submarines. One activist who sailed with him said he was one of the few who you knew, if you put your life in his hands, he’d shepherd it safely through whatever it was you had to face, and hand it back to you.
