At the same time news arrived that Al Gore and the IPCC were awarded the Noble Prize for Peace because of their work to raise awareness about climate change.

And six Greenpeace activists were given another two days in judicial custody for having pointed out that our government’s addiction to coal is taking our planet down. Yesterday they painted “Smoking Kills” on a chimney at the Kolaghat coal power station and the judge decided that the best thing to do was lock up the messengers who brought home the bad news.

I don’t know what to feel. Sometimes news doesn’t make any sense.

Earlier in the day, as our motley group sailed down the Hoogly to meet the boat, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I asked a few people there what they thought of the ship. Bahar Dutt, the environment editor reporting on the climate crisis for her television channel CNN-IBN, said that the Rainbow Warrior is a symbol, and an icon. Mukesh, a Greenpeace supporter from Pune who came to welcome the boat said she is fun. Vinuta, our climate campaigner said the Warrior offers us a platform to talk about climate change.

It was around 4 pm when Divya, our campaign manager walked up to me and said the people on the ship are gloomier than the prison. She had just bumped into Samir who had spent the morning with the Climate 6 at Midnapore jail and is now back on the Kidderpore Docks where the Rainbow Warrior is berthed.

It is not that the boat was in mourning or anything of the sort, on the contrary, the local members of Greenpeace Direct Dialogue along with the help of the boat crew had put up many colourful drawings made by Kolkata kids welcoming the ship to the city.

I never cease to wonder from where these kids get their ideas from. It is certainly not what they see around them when they are on their way to school, or to the local park at playtime. And here I include even the most privileged among them.

The pictures they drew are of a sun in the sky and a sparkling stream with many trees growing on the banks. There will be the mandatory two or three birds in the sky just above or below a rainbow and a happy dog or a cow jumping near a place that's apparently Home. Oh and yes, there was the ship in the stream and some fish too.

I can't imagine any kid these days in Kolkotta or Delhi or any other Indian big town getting a glimpse of this vision. Yet they draw, maybe, because it is there, deep in their hearts. Maybe it’s the picture of the world through the eyes as they see it.

Last night as the rest of the Greenpeace India crew were joining the ship and we were preparing to sail for the Sundarbans we got word from the office that Mysore Palace has agreed to switch its light bulbs for compact fluorescent bulbs. That’s 96,000 light bulbs!

The Palaces of Mysore are well know for their night-time light spectacle. Hundreds of thousands of tourists visit the palace ever year. What most people don ‘t know is that the palace could cut their light bills by as much as one-fifth and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 233 tonnes by switching to CFLs.

Chief Secretary and Chairperson, Palace Board, Prahlad B Mahishi told IBN “We'll try to implement it as early as possible. It's only the question of money. It's by self-financing that the maintenance of palace happens.”

If Mysore Palace can change it’s 96,000 lightbulbs, you can change yours too, and please sign up to our petition to ban the bulb.

You can follow the journey of the Rainbow Warrior in India, we will update this map regularly.

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[Sent in by the captain via email.]

Pilot boarded at three, we cast off, turned with the tug and left the berth to coincide with high water in the lock and hence the ebb side of high tide on the Hugli. At Fisherman’s Reach we dropped the anchor and snapped around it to face the down streaming river - there was a shallow patch ahead and we had to wait for a rising tide. The low water passed, anchor up on the rising tide, but now are push against the flooding stream.

The flood tides are short lived the further up the river one travels until eventually they disappear altogether and there is just a river coming down. We had the flood against us for three hours before we raced ahead once again on the ebb, reached the north of Sagar Island and sent two zodiacs with a shore excursion of six to attend a meeting on the southern tip of the island. Lesley was amongst them and when the small Greenpeace boats pulled up to the island there was a cheer from thousands - they thought that Lesley was the captain.

Rainbow was screaming ahead at this stage, doing twelve knots, racing against daylight to reach the southern tip of the island. Zodiacs returned to the ship, having disembarked their cargoes, we picked them up at full speed - we could not miss the sunset (and we didn’t).

[Sent in by Tracy by email.]

I’ve never wanted to be a celebrity, always loved my anonymity, so being welcomed to Sagar Island by 12,000 people was a bit overwhelming.

We sailed from Kolkata at three in the morning so by noon we were well down the Hugli and approaching the Bay of Bengal. The "meeting", as it was described to us, to welcome the Rainbow Warrior to Sagar Island was due to start in the early afternoon and the Warrior was still a few hours away so we launched two inflatable boats to take us to the northern tip of the island and we would go the rest of the way by jeep to beat the ship to the Sagar Ganges beach.

Driving to the meeting point we got a good look at the interior of the island. It was so green – rice paddy fields and trees all along the road with mud and thatch houses blending into the environment. There are also clusters of houses occasionally punctuated by shops and markets making up the villages of the island.

In all there are about 200,000 people living on this small island, and more people coming as they are forced off other nearby islands that are being engulfed by the sea.

When we arrived our jeep drove right up to the stage which I immediately thought was a bit odd, but then I saw some familiar faces and Shomo one of our climate campaigners said we had to go to the stage right away. He said quickly, or there will be a riot.

We set off early for the southeast corner of Sagar Island, the task today – plant 8000 mangrove seedlings along the shore to help hold back the advancing seas.

This is an experimental plantation project started by Professor Sugata Hazra, the Head of Oceanography at Jadhaupur University.

He says that the Sundarbans is already experiencing the worst of climate change. Sea levels are rising faster here than the global average and the intensity of cyclonic storms and monsoon rainfall has increased.

The shift in rain patterns is having an impact on local crops and will affect the local communities’ food security while the change in salinity of the estuary also means fewer fish for them. Already two islands have disappeared underwater and many more are under threat.

Getting profiles from the crew is always like pulling teeth, this trip is no exception. Most people ask what should I write? But oh the excuses – I have no brain, there were no chairs in the office, I don’t believe in this hero worship stuff it should be about the environment, I didn’t feel like writing last night…

But I consider this a personal victory, everyone on board has now written a profile, which is a first for me. Thank you fabulous crew for all pitching in.

Of course, not every one of us could sail on the Rainbow Warrior to Sundarbans and I was one of those left out.

So I did the next best thing to being there and discovering it first hand.

I bought a copy of The Hungry Tide a beautiful work of fiction set in the Sundarbans by Amitav Ghosh and settled down to read it on my way back to Bangalore and with every turn of the page I was drawn deeper into its fascinating world.

I’ve just come off my first sea watch, we’re about 50 nautical miles off the coast from Gopalpur travelling at almost 10 knots.

The autopilot is temporarily disabled, I think the story is that Hans touched it and everything he touches these days ends up broken, but I can’t be sure. So we are doubling up on sea watches because we have to steer manually.

I got the sunrise shift - four to eight in the morning, and while I’m normally not one to jump out of the bed in the morning, especially at 4am, it was a bit easier knowing I was going to get to steer The Rainbow Warrior.

We arrived in Chennai today and made our mark: a big sign down the side of ship – CUT COAL – SAVE CLIMATE. The ship, like so many other cargo ships along this coast, is a coal carrier that ferries thermal coal from Paradip in the north to coal fired power stations in Chennai.

We sat just off shore with the harbour in sight of the Rainbow Warrior and we could see the ship under the larger cranes that unload the coal here. As the APJ Sridevi started to move out of the harbour, we got our four inflatable boats in the water. Two carrying teams to paint the 8 ft letters on the side of the ship, one safety boat and another boat carrying our campaigner Vinuta, the photographer, boat driver, crew and myself. We didn’t have time to get the local video crew on board so I doubled up as blogger and videographer – my first time shooting a Greenpeace action.

Rainbow Warrior stopped on her own accord - a black out. “Don’t bother starting the other engine” I informed the Chief engineer. We were in a good position 10 miles off the power station with five radios tuned to differing frequencies - monitoring Chennai and in particular Ennore Port, on the East coast of India. Hans the radio operator intercepted transmission between the bulk carrier Sridevi and the harbour pilot - her cargo operation complete (another 77 000 tonnes of thermal coal on the conveyor to become electricity).

"RainbowWarrior this is Port Control. What are your intentions?”

“Port Control this is Rainbow Warrior. My intention is to keep north of the Fairway, clear of the Shridevi. I will not impede her safe navigation.”

We were so close to the breakwater (just a mile off). The Shridevi’s attention was on us - the tall ship waiting at the breakwater. The four teeny-weeny little zodiacs that came up on her other side, her lee-side, went by unnoticed… until they started painting.

The Rainbow Warrior left India last night after being refused entry into the port of Chennai. While we were waiting for word on the ship, Nimi from the land team was working hard to get the ship into the harbour for a press conference, to get supplies and disembark the Indian crew.

But it seems we ruffled a few feathers with our “CUT COAL” painting action Monday at the port entrance to Ennore.

On board the port authority was telling us that the port was congested and there was no room, but in the port the owners of the shipping companies were meeting with the port chairman pressuring him to refuse entry to the Rainbow Warrior.