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Australian (Dutch born), Amsterdam and Hobart are home

How did you come to work for Greenpeace?
By chance. I started working as expeditioner for the Antarctic World Park Base in 1987/88. Upon return, started working for IT support at the Greenpeace International headquarters.

What are you looking forward to most on this tour?
The ice and being able to protect whales.

What do you love most about working on the Greenpeace ships?
The caring atmosphere, living and working together with a common goal.

Have you thought about pulsing the whaler's ships radio signals to prevent communication between the spotters on the crows nest to the captain? If the spotters can't effectively let their captains know where the whales are, it should slow them down considerably. Or would interfering with their radio signals be a violation of an international maritime law of some kind?

73's and 88's to the crew of Greenpeace ,,,

Carol , i would like to answer that one ,, in radio comunications ,,, any such "JAMMING " or interfearance is of a big no-no !! and can lead to other issues ,,, i am a ham radio operator ,, and the aspects of such even on land is a big trouble ,,, as to maritime ,, it is even more so a violation of internation Radio operations laws ,,

i would hope the ships chaseing the japs , had a IRLP link , and we could talk via IRLP ,,i can talk to Aus. from here , but cannot get in contact with the ships ,,,,, and i sure would like to be able to !!

God be besides you all there !!

Denise

Hello there Sjoerd - great to see that you're back at sea!

Today we have a WiFi link to the Esperanza again, which in turn has a VSAT 'always on' to Internet at a flat rate, so I have a chance to browse Internet from the Arctic Sunrise and post some replies.

First of all, I am often listening on the 20 meters amateur radio band down here, but hear very little of the rest of the world. Due to polar effects the propagation is very poor, and we are lucky to pick up Radio Australia clearly for a few hours.

Unfortunately, we are not set up for IRLP, even if we have good propagation from time to time. We don't have that much time anyway. The radio room is often very hectic with 'normal' operations.

To make things worse, we have lost two of our HF aerials after the recent 'encounter' with the Nishin Maru, which pulled our foremast away, breaking the antenna wires and a tuning box. We now have some jury rigged aerials towards the helideck, which have to be moved out of the way every time the helicopter needs to 'land' here.

Anyway, we do hear some funny signals on the amateur VHF and UHF bands coming from the Japanese vessels. Probably encrypted data and voice signals, but they clearly don't belong on the amateur bands! The whalers don't comply to many rules, as you can see in our weblog elsewhere too.

The spotters in the crows nest don't use radios to communicate to their captains. It is more likely to be wired intercoms, and hand signals.

Thanks for the thought, though!

73 and 88s,
Sjoerd (SoJo)

Hi Sojo, Looking at your picture you have less hair than when we were on Macca!! Still, you have lots more than me though. Going (gone) grey too,, so have I.
You guys have been in the news a lot here in Melbourne,,, good work.
Regards, Greg

Hi Greg,

Yeah, 20 years of Greenpeace since Macquarie Island gave me grey hairs. But it's worth it though!

Good to see the enormous support in Australia. If only we gained some support in Japan too! I'm sure our stance will gain public support once they hear what actually goes on down here.

Cheers,
SoJo