Tour Guide on the Arctic Sunrise!

As a Greenpeace fundraiser I went to see the famous Rainbow Warrior III in Stockholm and it was this opportunity that drove me to volunteer for Greenpeace. This is why I immediately signed up for giving ship tours on Greenpeace's The Arctic Sunrise and was thrilled when I got the role! The ship came to London in June as the last stop on its European tour in support of the CFP campaign. Fishing within the EU is controlled by the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) which is currently not looking too good. The law can only be reformed every 10^th year and this is why Greenpeace have been campaigning to make the law better since 2012 when the reforming-process began.

To be honest I was quite nervous about giving public tours on Arctic Sunrise. We started out with a tour on the ship: to see it ourselves and to know what to tell in which places. When it comes to naming different parts of a ship my vocabulary is already limited in my native tongue - Danish - and in English it’s even smaller. It didn’t boost my confidence when I proudly pointed at the inflatable boats, swapped some letters and called the RIBS “Inflammable boats”. Oops. Rod, whom I was going to give the tours with, started to look just a little bit nervous.

We got our first group of 15-20 people on board and the tour began. Everyone in the group was really interested in the ship and the facts and short stories we told. Personally I have never experienced communicating to a group of people so easily, and quickly stopped being nervous.  At some of the stops on the tour we received some help from members of the crew, which was especially nice on the Bridge where the steering takes place. It seemed to me that the ship has hundreds of buttons, compasses and small devices. The hardest part was not bumping into other groups on the ship as Greenpeace were showing around 45 people in different parts of the ship all at once.

On my lunch break I got the chance to see some of the other activities going on that day. A stall was collecting the public's signatures on paper boats for the Common Fishery Policy Campaign. Next to the ship the public got the chance to see one of the action-boats up close. My favourite stall was the fish-costume stall, it had two giant fish-costumes that everybody could wear. I had my picture taken as a beautiful trout-ish fish! All in all, it was a great day and I managed not to say inflammable or any other inappropriate words. I’m already looking forward to my next chance to get on board on a Greenpeace Ship!