Although Pete was not on board when the ship was bombed, he did spend a year on the original Rainbow Warrior - a year that changed his life:

It's hard to remember how different it was back then. Pre-email, pre-GPS. We were still using sextants for navigation.

I saw on the TV that they needed professional sailors, so I went down to the dock and offered to help. I would never claim to be one of the people with big ideas, but I was just glad I could put my skills to good use.

Our first real campaign was in Iceland against whaling. We sort of followed the template from the guys in the US and Canada who had been taking on Russian whaling. After that we went down off the coast of Spain to stop whaling there. Then we went up off the coast of Ireland where the UK was dumping nuclear waste into the sea. I still remember the captain of the nuclear waste ship asking me, "What are we supposed to do with all of this nuclear waste then?" And we were like, "Well, exactly, this is our point, but anyway you can't dump it in the ocean anymore."

A lot has changed since then. The dumping nuclear waste at sea was finally banned in 1993; Spain and Russia ended their commercial whaling; Iceland stopped whaling then started again in 2003 (they killed 39 minke whales last year). And of course, the original Rainbow Warrior now sits on the bottom of the ocean off the coast of New Zealand. It was bombed by French agents seeking to keep the ship from interfering with their country's nuclear testing program. In the long run the agents failed. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was adopted in 1996, and France dismantled its nuclear testing facility. But then that was not the end of the story for nuclear weapons or for Pete.

Over the years, Pete has worked on seven Greenpeace ships, on all of the oceans in the world. Now he returns to the Esperanza to take her up the west coast of Africa - continuing the Defending Our Oceans expedition. You can take part as well, by signing up as an Ocean Defender.