At dinner last night (some of the crew were able to join us for an Indian meal in town) I managed to convince Charles to let me spend a few hours in the galley today. In return for three hours of stringing beans, whipping egg yolks, washing the largest pans I've ever dragged my digits through and fetching and carrying from the massive refrigerator one floor down, Charles kindly agreed to show me how to sacher up a torte! It's still cooling down below, so I can't say if it'll be the masterpiece it promised to be, but I can vouch for it being absolutely heavenly when I licked the batter clean.

This is definitely a story I shall tell my grandchildren some day. When they ask where I learnt to make such a delicious sacher torte, can you imagine being able to say, "Ahhh, I learnt it from Chocolate-thumbs Charles, in the galley of the Esperanza, when it sailed in to Defend Our Oceans." Nice bedtime story, I imagine, as they scrape crumbs of that heavenly chocolate cake off their plates.

What I do hope, of course, is that this bedtime story will have a happy ending like all good stories do. I hope that I will be able to tell my grandchildren that this was the campaign that led to the creation of a network of marine reserves along India's coast and all around the world. That this was the beginning of an oceans campaign that is helping Greenpeace acquire one million Ocean Defenders in the course of an expedition. That these voices together won many battles, big and small, and forced multinational companies and multilateral government agencies to put an end to all destructive, extractive use of our glorious oceans.

For that, I'd even give up chocolate cake altogether… but only after I've eaten at least one slice of the one Charles made today.

Namrata Chowdhary
(Communications Officer – Greenpeace India)