September 2010

After a mammoth 50 hours in the water in front of their drill ship, following 100 hours on Chevron's anchor chain, the oil giant's lawyers have again stopped our protest.

Last night we received news over the ship's radio that Chevron had gained another injunction against us, preventing us from interfering in any way with their operation - otherwise face massive daily fines.

We pulled our last swimmers out of the water yesterday afternoon at about four, all of us exhausted after round-the-clock shifts to block the 228-metre Stena Carron from reaching its drill spot.

Here's the latest video from Esperanza off the west of Shetland, as our swimmers continue their vigil to halt Chevron's giant drill ship, the Stena Carron. This phase of the action is now in its third day. We've been stopping the deepwater oil drillers for a week now.

I've spent the last 46 hours getting in and out of a big red survival suit. Its made out of the thickest wetsuit material and makes me look like a telly-tubby. I can't really move my hands, or arms, or feet, or turn my head, or speak, but it keeps me well toasty in the chilly Atlantic ocean.

Then I am put in a boat, someone squashes fins onto my feet and ten minutes later I am plopped into the sea at the bow of Chevron's drill ship, which we have stopped dead in the water. As I take up a good position at the bow, where the waves meet and I don't get too pushed around, it always reminds me of the wave machines I used to love as a kid, except none of them threw me up and down 5 metres or more.

As our swimming action in front of Chevron's ship enters its third day, we've been stopping the deepwater oil drillers for a week now.

First the portaledge on their anchor chain, then the pod, and now swimmers in the water.

And we're still continuing.

A few days ago we asked you – our supporters everywhere – to suggest a banner slogan for the pod. We received loads of great entries and in the end went for one we really liked by  Michele Westlake (aka @crazyladywriter) on Twitter. It says: "Don’t SpOIL our planet".

The only problem was, with Chevron’s lawyers forcing our pod down, we had to figure out somewhere else to put it. Well, smack bang in front of the 228-metre Stena Carron seemed like a good idea, so when we jumped in yesterday, we took the banner with us.

Watch this great video of Victor, who along with Anais, was the first to scale Chevron’s Stena Carron anchor chain and start the 100 hour occupation of the ship.

Wow. It’s still sinking in. It's not every day you get to jump in front of a moving ship and actually make it stop.

Last night – about fifteen minutes before I was turning in – I heard that Chevron's drill ship, the one that we'd been hanging off for over 100 hours, had started up its engines and was heading towards its deepwater drill site north of Shetland.

Chevron had earlier hit us with a legal injunction, which said that if we got on the ship – with the pod or anything else – we'd face massive daily fines that we couldn't justify using our supporters' money to pay.

But we still had to do something. So last night as news came in that the Stena Carron was moving, Ben – our lead campaigner on board – tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was still up for going tomorrow.

We may have been forced by legal action to end our 100-hour occupation of Chevron's giant drill ship, Stena Carron, yesterday - but that doesn't mean we've given up trying to stop its journey towards a deep water drilling site off Scotland.

Just hours after we removed our survival pod from the ship's anchor chain, it left for a site in the Lagavulin oil field where it will drill an exploratory well in 500 metres of water.

So this afternoon we sent out an actions team in inflatable speedboats to track Stena Carron, now in open seas 100 miles north of Shetland. At 1.30pm they managed to put four swimmers in the drill ship's path, forcing it to stop.