The Lofoten and Barents Sea areas are among the last relatively pristine marine habitats on Earth. The region is under threat from over-fishing, increasing risk of oil tanker accidents and the oil industrys desire for new drilling grounds. Unless action is taken to protect this unique environment, it is likely to be destroyed.
September 24, 2005
Dreams and dolphins
Another night full of long and very clear dreams has passed. Dreams you have on ships are amazing, maybe its the motion of the sea, which starts to jog your memories. In the middle of the night I woke up and I couldn´t sense where I was. For 10 minutes I felt as though I was stuck in the interior of the earth, everything hot and moving around me and I felt really nervous. And later I dreamed I was on a very old but very fast sailing ship, out in the dark , way too fast to sail around the most beautiful blue whale, who suddenly appeared. Couldn´t think of anything else than that we might hit and hurt it... I don´t know, where the first dream came from, but I am damned sure about the origin of the second.
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Posted by Irene at 12:33 PM | Comments (3)
September 23, 2005
Hopen Island - a wall in the the middle of the nowhere
Isolation, wild, icy, remote, inspiring, solitude all words to describe the island of Hopen and none of them adequate to quite capture the feeling of being two miles offshore of this remote island in the Barents Sea. After riding out a storm on the open ocean over the past two days, an awe-inspiring event in itself, the Esperanza finally came into the lee of Hopen Island yesterday evening.
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Posted by Irene at 11:19 AM | Comments (1)
September 20, 2005
We need more condoms!
Confessions of a pirate Captain
Another day on the high seas of the arctic and another illegal fishing boat. Monday night after our team returned from the MURTOSA fishing vessel we started following another blimp on the radar: 82m long fishing vessel KERGULEN. This ship also has an interesting recent past. When we spoke to the captain he said the vessel is registered under Guinean flag, according to the SeaSearcher database the flag is Mauritania and according to the latest EU information it is under Togo flag. Quite confusing, but this is common practice with illegal ships and is called flag hopping. We found out that the owner of the ship is French with a front office in the Falkland Islands and the ships crew of 42 men are mainly Portuguese.
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Posted by Irene at 10:55 PM | Comments (11)
Action in the Barents Sea against pirate fishing
See video from the action (Windows Media, )
"How can we break the f**king law, when there is no f**king law", the captain of the trawler called Murtosa screamed at us as we sat on the fishing net onboard his ship.
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Posted by Irene at 9:48 AM
September 19, 2005
Kristin's first trip on a Greenpeace ship
German journalist Kristin was invited to join the Esperanza in the Barents Sea:
I am on board of the Esperanza for the tour into the Barents as a journalist from a German diving magazine. When Stefanie Werner from Greenpeace Germany called our office like two months ago to invite somebody from the Unterwasser magazine to be on board, we where convinced from the very first second that it would be a good idea to be doing a story about the trip.
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Posted by Irene at 10:49 AM
September 15, 2005
Well wishes in a bottle
This morning we had a nice start for the working day. After the ship clean-up duties we gathered together into the mess and Stefanie our German oceans campaigner delivered us a huge bottle filled with mysterious looking paper scrolls. Greenpeace Germanys GreenTeam, a Greenpeace activist group for children between 8-15, turned 15 years last weekend. They had a birthday celebration on a sailing ship where everyone was dressed up as pirates and they wrote messages for the crew on Esperanza and the campaign up here in Norway.
QuickTime: See the crew on the Esperanza recieve the messages
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Posted by Irene at 3:25 PM | Comments (1)
Not a tanker in sight
We are arriving at Kirkenes, very close to the Russian border. The sun is shining and the even though the temperature has dropped quite a bit there is still a hint of summer. So except that we have not seen a single oil tanker on our way, the sailing up here has been very good.
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Posted by Irene at 2:56 PM | Comments (1)