The captain of the APJ Sridevi which we painted on Monday says that our small inflatable boats impeded his navigation and made his ship unstable. His 176m cargo ship. You can see from the video we did not get in his way, and it would be nearly impossible for our small boats to make his giant ship unstable.

But the argument was enough to get us barred from Chennai. In fact an alert was sent out to all Indian ports to refuse entry to the Rainbow Warrior. We don’t know how long this will last, but it won’t stop us.

As Ananth, the executive director of Greenpeace in India, told a press conference in Chennai today – Greenpeace has a long and successful tradition of non-violent direct action, we did it, and we’ll do it again. We have just 10 years to save the climate, so if this isn’t the time for action, he said he doesn’t know what is.

A few months ago before Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize he said “I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power stations.”

Ganhdi gave non-violent direct action to India and the world, and we must continue, now more than ever, until there is an energy revolution that saves our climate and the planet as we know it.

The Rainbow Warrior will continue its mission on to Singapore and then Bali for the next meeting on the Kyoto Protocol as scheduled, and Greenpeace in India will continue to work to stop climate change focusing in the next few months for a ban on the incandescent bulb. If the bulb were banned in India it would save at least 5% of the country's emissions.

You can help support the campaign for energy efficient bulbs by signing our petition to ban the bulb.

So with the ship refused entry into any port in India we had just one problem – getting the Indian office staff back on shore. We found out today we all nearly ended up in Singapore with the ship, the port isn’t accustomed to bringing passengers ashore and through immigration without a ship.

Nimi worked all day to get us off the ship and finally in the late afternoon they reluctantly agreed, but said it would be the last time they would do anything like this. The launch arrived just after dark with the food supplies for the trip to Singapore, and the 10 of us said farewell to our new friends on board and goodbye to the Rainbow Warrior. Hopefully she’ll be back in India soon.

Tracy