Captain Frank does not seem to be too concerned though, singing along with Iggy Pop on the bridge. The sun shines, we have the wind in our back and the ship is happy. You could argue that the Esperanza can't possible be happy, as she is just a big piece of metal, and you might be right. But we depend on her so much: if she is "happy" it means we are safe. And for some reason I can't look at her and see only a big chunk of floating metal.

At sea you can make all the plans you want, the weather will in the end decide what you are able to do. As we head south it gets warmer, and I like the big swells although they have altered our schedule. Yesterday we had to bring some people ashore and bring others back from San Felipe. The waves went high and they got a very wet ride. In the evening I found notebooks and paper laid out to dry all over the sauna. Yes, there is a sauna onboard probably because the ship was once built by Russians. For someone from Finland it is of course the best part of the ship. Not even Bent our chief engineer argues against that the sauna is almost as important as the engine room. While you stew you can peek out through a porthole.

However the sauna does not seem to have been there from the very beginning. Most ships have their little mysteries I guess, and the Esperanza is no exception. She was ordered by the Soviet Union in the days of the cold war in the 80s as a military fire fighting vessel. When she was converted to suit the needs of a Greenpeace ship, she was found to have an unusual amount of watertight doors - there were double doors all over the ship. The vent system was of course designed to prevent smoke from entering in case you had to go near a big fire. But if you look closely at the old ventilation system, you can see that it was possible to seal the ship off completely, leaving only one air intake for the whole vessel. This vent lead straight to a filter below, right next to the sauna area. You could pass through several doors, and no air would be let into the ship from the outside. One theory onboard is that the place where the sauna is located was once the nuclear decontamination area. Attempts have been made to get the original blueprints, but no luck so far.

I'll stop playing detective now and go get decontaminated.