Expanding the dimensions of peaceful protest

Posted by jossc — 23 September 2010 at 1:18pm - Comments

From Anais in the survival pod on the Stena Carron:

It’s my first time on the Shetland Islands. Rolling green hills, stunning cliffs, great wildlife, castle ruins and plenty of sheep everywhere. You can see how the life of the islands' inhabitants has been shaped by the sea over centuries. I am glad for this glance at another beautiful side of this planet - although we didn’t have much time on land.

We had to prepare an "instant action pack". On Tuesday morning in a hidden-away bay near Lerwick, the back of a van opened and a self-inflating direct action team popped out and unfolded. Boat drivers, a media team, along with the climb team (that's me and Victor from Sweden) boarded two inflatables filled with various gear bags and headed towards our target, Chevron's oil drilling ship, the Stena Carron.

It was just about to put out to sea - heading towards the Llagavulin off-shore deep water drilling site. Well, it is not going there anymore, because we have installed the Go Beyond Oil protest camp on its starboard anchor chain. It didn't take long to adjust to our new giant environment with it's gigantic scale. The nature of a massive chain holding a 12.7 tonne anchor is to hang straight down and be one-dimensional, so it was not that difficult to move vertically on the huge chain segments.

It got a bit tricky at the point when we started to expand our camp horizontally. The wind whipped up and that didn't help our attempt to open up our tent - getting two people and several dry bags inside became a real challenge under these circumstances. But after having managed to set ourselves up with plenty of food and warm clothes (plus the essential roll of duct tape) under the waterproof triangular shelter, we were quite happy.

After dusk it started drizzling a little but we were dry and warm under the fly-sheet of the portaledge. Then, beside the dark outline of the portside anchor two top-lights appeared, and a very familiar ship's silhouette could be made out clearly from the mist - the Esperanza had arrived! A short while later we heard a very familiar rumble approaching, immediately identified by Victor as the Ocean Witness - one of the Espy's inflatables. One look out of our tiny window was proof that it was indeed the Witness - coming to be our safety boat for the next four hours.

Although it was just two days since we'd left the ship in Aberdeen, we were really longing for a reunion with our colleagues and friends - and in just one night our small protest team grew to an entire highly spirited ship's crew. Wednesday morning saw Timo and Nazareth joining us on the anchor chain, they arrived in another boat that also towed the infamous pod - an adapted version of a mountaineer's prefab shelter.

It took our climb team several hours of effort, heaps of heavy load-rigging equipment and some rudimentary improvisation to heave up our bulky new home to its final position. As the extension of the chain block allowed just three metres of heaving at a time, we had to move in stages to finally settle down safely at the third floor, around nine metres above sea level.

We just managed to have everything rigged in time for a vegetable curry lunch. Sitting in a circle inside this tiny but comfortable spot creates a social and protective atmosphere feels somewhere between a space station, a tipi and an igloo. It’s going to be the perfect base camp to carry on with our protest over the coming days.

About Joss

Bass player and backing vox in the four piece beat combo that is the UK Greenpeace Web Experience. In my 6 years here I've worked on almost every campaign and been fascinated by them all to varying degrees. Just now I'm working on Peace and Oceans - which means getting rid of our Trident nuclear weapons system and creating large marine reserves so that marine life can get some protection from overfishing.

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