Pirate captain ... Paul Watson, founder of environmental group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Photo: AP
Paul Watson calls it "Getting out of Dodge" - as in the Wild West's Dodge City. The hardline conservationist knows when the forces arrayed against him mean it's time to leave town.
He got out of Dodge once in 2006, just hours before authorities in Hobart were told his ship Farley Mowat should be detained, having been stripped of its Belizean flag.
Since then he has led the transformation of his group from a self-proclaimed pirate outfit, to a small, efficient navy funded largely by Hollywood millionaires.
Now he has suddenly taken flight from Germany, where he was being detained over another 10 year-old decision to get out of Dodge in Costa Rica.
The decision to skip bail in Frankfurt throws into doubt his ability to lead the group he founded 35 years ago.
Pensive and bearish, the Canadian-born Watson, 61, was an original Greenpeace member who broke with the group in the 1970s. Most of those activists have recalled Mr Watson as too much warrior and not enough rainbow.
In Canada his own group first raised their profile internationally against seal hunters, but in 1979 he was to change the face of anti-whaling direct action.
His first ship, a 779-tonne former North Sea trawler called Sea Shepherd, rammed the Atlantic Ocean's pirate whaling ship, Sierra, in Leixoes, northern Portugal.
Sierra was damaged, repaired, and later sunk with a limpet mine by unidentified saboteurs. Mr Watson was released, but when his vessel was held, he scuttled it.
"We traded a ship for a ship," he said. "But it was a great trade because we also traded our ship for the lives of hundreds of whales that would be spared from the Sierra."
In the following years he claimed to have sunk other Icelandic and Norwegian whaling boats , many of which were raised and resumed whaling.
He was detained in Amsterdam in 1992 over the sinking of the Norwegian ship Nybraena, but although they held him for 80 days, the Dutch refused to hand him over to Norway.
He took up other campaigns, including an anti-poacher patrol off central America that led to the Costa Rican charges. In this incident, Mr Watson was in Guatemalan waters when he encountered the Costa Rican vessel Varadero and the two collided with minimal damage.
He maintains that, on the order of Guatemalan authorities, Sea Shepherd instructed the crew of the Varadero to cease their shark-finning activities and head back to port to be prosecuted.
Then, under pressure from the lucrative shark fin industry, authorities turned against his group. It is this case that resurfaced a decade later to snare him in Germany.
But the campaigns that lifted Sea Shepherd's resources and profile more than any other are the eight expeditions he has undertaken to the Antarctic against Japanese "scientific" whaling ships.
Harassment by Sea Shepherd is claimed to have saved thousands of minke whales from the harpoon. A series of high seas collisions also ensued, climaxing in 2010 with the loss of the Sea Shepherd ship Ady Gil, sliced in two by a Japanese ship.
Sea Shepherd is now an $11 million turnover organisation, 84 per cent funded by private donation, according to its US tax returns.
The latest celebrity donor to fund the campaign is The Simpson's co-creator, Sam Simon, whose name will be on the side of a former German icebreaker set to join the fleet.
The identity of the icebreaker is as yet unknown, as are the whereabouts of Mr Watson.
"We have no further information and are not in touch with him," the group's administrative director, Susan Hartland, said.