When someone pointed out that this would probably lead to people dying, Defend Europe responded by saying that they were only going to monitor the NGOs and report any wrongdoing. Incidentally, one of the people aboard the Whitest Pearl was Lauren Southern, a right-wing vlogger and human/mayonnaise hybrid who months before had been arrested by the Italian coast guard for blockading an NGO vessel ... and firing flares at it.
Pictured: a bunch of normal, level-headed folks.
But not everything went according to plan. The initial launch of the C-Star was delayed for several days after the mayor of Catania, Sicily refused the ship permission to dock in the city's port, which meant they had to scurry over to Cyprus in order to catch their cruise -- at which point further protests forced them to abandon plans to refuel in Greece and Tunisia. The C-Star's engine then broke down, and while the crew eventually radioed the coast guard and asked for help, this arrived in the form of Sea Eye, an NGO whose ship was sailing nearby, looking for refugees to rescue. The racists turned them away, apparently preferring a slow, agonizing death on the high seas.
The C-Star was eventually repaired and sent on its way, but at one point in the journey, the captain was detained for failing to prepare a crew manifest, which seems a little odd. Isn't "write down the names of your crew" the easiest job a captain has? Why wouldn't he prepare one? Well, that might be because he was using the trip as a cover for human trafficking. When the C-Star stopped over in Cyprus, authorities boarded and found 21 refugees -- refugees who, according to reports, had paid the captain and crew 10,000 euros each for safe passage to Italy.
Despite somehow managing to increase the number of refugees in Europe, Defend Europe eventually declared the mission a success. Although, let's be real, the bar for "success" for these folks couldn't get any lower if they accidentally ate a buoy.