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.
One of the swimmers, Ben Stewart, said: "That oil drill ship is the size of a sky-scraper on its side and as it cut through the water towards us I felt really scared, it's like nothing I’ve ever done, but we are determined to stop it reaching its deepwater drilling site.
"We need to go beyond oil, we need our politicians to stop ships like this from threatening our pristine coastlines and the global climate. It shouldn’t be down to people bobbing in the water in front of ships to stop the insane rush for the last drops of oil in ever more dangerous and difficult to reach places."
See the latest pictures from the action on our Flickr site »
As a result the 228-metre long Stena Carron has been halted on its journey to the drilling site. We're now planning to send waves of swimmers and campaigners in kayaks out in front of the drill ship throughout today and tomorrow to pressure the ship into turning back. And we're also doing everything we can to stop the ship through legal channels, having sent a "letter before action” to the government, the precursor to seeking a judicial review of the decision to push ahead with new deep water drilling before the lessons from the BP disaster have been learned.
We've already seen the disastrous consequence of deep water drilling in the Gulf. It's fraught with danger for the environment, the climate, and the workers involved - and it's got to be stopped.
