Goodbye Shetlands

Yesterday the MV Esperanza and its crew of 36 said goodbye to the Shetlands. We gathered on the deck as we sailed past the headland at Sumburgh and left the waters of these beautiful rugged islands to the sound of voices chattering in the many languages that inhabit our ship.

South West then, into the waters off the Scottish mainland. Spreading out beneath the grey sky was a silver sea dotted with oil rigs. They come in clusters, in lines of four or five spaced a mile or more apart. If you approach an oil field from a certain angle you see the rigs lined up, the closest huge and menacing, the others getting smaller the further away they are, like a line of those identical Russian dolls that fit inside each other. There are over 570 oil and gas rigs in the North Sea, and they pose a huge threat to the marine environment.

The oil industry is a major source of pollution here, with as much as 1,600km2 of the Sea floor affected by drilling over the last 30 years. We witnessed the drill rig SEBO 704 (it seems the romance has gone out of naming vessels these days) making riser connections for a new well. It is one of many new oil developments in the North Sea. So far this year drilling has started on 22 new standalone exploration and appraisal wells – compared to 32 all last year, and investment is reported to be on track to hit £4.4 billion, up about 10 per cent on the previous 12 months. That is to say, the expolitation is intensifying. But you can see that by simply looking through a port hole. At night the lights of the rigs flicker just above the horizon, red and green and blue, like frozen fireworks.

A Greenpeace overflight recently witnessed a huge slick of oil seeping from Shell's Dunlin A platform. We approached the rig and Andrea, our intrepid German campaigner, took to the radio. Had there been an incident on July 7th, she asked? The senior fellow from Shell seemed coy. It's just that we saw a large spill from the air, said Andrea. A momentary splutter, then the chap from Shell gave us a number to call in Aberdeen. We still await an explanation.

I suppose our friends at Shell might have got the heebie-jeebies at the sight of a Greenpeace boat in these waters. It was at their Brent field near here that they wanted to sink the Spar in 1995. We won a famous victory that time, and here we are again. I don't suppose our tour will be as eventful as those famous days, but one can only hope.

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Camera Lucida

The MV Esperanza is bobbing up and down in a gentle sway above Pobie Bank, to the East of the Shetland Islands. We've been off the Islands - the Northern most of the British Isles - for two days now. From the deck the crew can see white stone cottages clung to the sides of steep green banks that fall off to the craggy coast. These islands are beautiful isolated platforms of rock where seals outnumber the people.

We're here documenting the destruction of the marine environment by exploititive industries, and to film the fish, animals and coral that live in the North Sea. Our technology-endowed cameramen Gavin and Wolf have dived seven or eight locations now, weighed down with their hugely impressive underwater gear that seems so advanced it wouldn't look out of place in the pages of an Issac Asimov novel. The pictures they have taken are spectacular - how strange that these are the first humans ever to have seen these seabeds, and the first humans the inhabitants have ever seen.

Unfortunately, however, the marine life in this region is likely to have felt the effects of human endevour over recent decades. The North Sea between the Shetlands and Norway is scarred by oil-rigs too numerous to count. Our next task will be to document the effect this industry is having on the marine environment.

Sitting in an inflatable above the divers, keeping a keen eye on the red marker bouy that marks their position, you wonder what life must be like in one of those little cottages. Certainly different from the busy, chattering world on board a Greenpeace ship. One road, no cars. Any shops? Probably not, but there's a hell of a lot of puffins.

The crew continues to tend to the many tasks necessary to keep the Esperanza in ship-shape condition. Painting, scrubbing, cooking and cleaning from 8 til 6 - with the odd coffee break or tug on a cigarette. Last night we celebrated the birthday of Trinidadian Tyrone. Rumour abounded that he's hit 47, but surely not. He looks about 17. Well, 30 maybe.

We had more to celebrate as well. It was the Esperanza that earlier this year toured the English channel to expose the appalling number of dolphins and porpoises caught and killed in the nets of bass fishing trawlers. Yesterday UK fisheries minister Ben Bradshaw withdrew the bass boats after government trials confirmed what Greenpeace had exposed. The crew of the Esperanza can rightly claim to have done much to bring this about, and their proud acheivement was last night toasted with a quite appalling cooking wine pilfered from the kitchen.

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The North Sea

The Greenpeace ship MV Esperanza left its London berth at 8am on Thursday 15th July with 36 crew and box full of our new report calling for the establishment of marine reserves across 40% of the North and Baltic Seas.

On board we have Germans, Brits, a Swede, Dutch, South Africans, Turkish... and Natalia from Greece who intermitently pops her head around the corner with a grin that can't be unconnected to a recent football match. We're going to be spending 10 weeks at sea, researching the effect of exploitation on the precious marine life off our coasts.

Our first day saw us chug up the Thames estury and head North to an area of sea off Great Yarmouth. As we moored, the site of 30 towering turbines hovered into view - the Scoby Sands off-shore wind farm. Two years ago I'd been in Yarmouth organising a press conference calling for wind developments off East Anglia, and now here we were, staring at the real thing. But it is events below the water-line that are of concern to us this summer. A compelling body of scientific evidence suggests that stocks of some of our best known fish - cod, sole, plaice - are 'beyond safe biological limits' (pointy-head-speak for the disturbing possibility that they could become commercially extinct in our waters.)

The Friday morning saw us launch a Rigid Inflatable Boat (RIB) from the Esperanza. On board were our divers Wolf and Gavin and an array of rather bemusing photographic equipment that you could safely drop in the bath. We approached a sand dredger - a huge floating extraction machine that sucks up sand and gravel from the seabed for us in construction on land. The average Briton uses 3 tonnes of sand and gravel (aggregates) every year, and we're getting it in increasing amounts from the sea. Greenpeace wants to know more about the effect of this business on our marine life, and we want the companies responsible to know more abour our campaign. Unfortunately the captain on the dredger didn't feel compelled to take a copy of our report.

The divers were down for a half hour. They saw the huge trenches where the extractor had sucked up the seabed, and not much else. It appears the effect of extraction has been to disturb utterly the balance of life beneath the water. Other than the odd octopus and starfish, this area of the North Sea was devoid of life.

It seems strange that Gavin and Wolf are the first humans ever to have seen that small area of the planet. And it seems so unfortunate that there was so little left to sea when eventually they got there.

Next, the Shetland Islands. Fishing fleets are decimating stocks - there are too many boats chasing too few fish. We hope to speak to some of the boats. Maybe they'll be keener to take a look at our report.

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