Dawn brought some relief from rain and squalls, and it has turned into a lovely day. The wind has just turned a bit south of west so we're zipping along at about 7 knots and beginning to make contact with other boats making their way to the gathering point at Whangaroa harbour, from which we will sail tomorrow morning to pay our respects to the old Warrior at a dawn ceremony in Matauri Bay, some 70 feet above where she lays on the bottom.

I haven't been up here for almost ten years... when we did a sail-by and a brief ceremony on our way to Moruroa just after the newly elected French President Jacques Chirac had announced a resumption of nuclear testing at the 'Centre du Experimentacion Pacifique' in the Tuamotus in French Polynesia... and before that it was in 1987 when we came to lay the old ship at her final resting place. Odd that Chirac is now the strongest advocate of action on climate change at this weeks's G8 summit in Scotland. They say that politics makes strange bedfellows, and although we're not on intimate terms, you have to give him credit for standing up to Bush - first on the war in Iraq, and now on the climate issue...

It's great to be back in nuclear-free New Zealand, seeing old friends, some of whom haven't met up for 10 or 20 years... we're all 10 or 20 years older however, and seeing familiar old faces reminds one of how much the world has changed in that time...but on the other hand how much has changed. While the threat of a nuclear Armageddon from a strategic exchange between the superpowers is much less of a threat than it was then, we live in a world that is equally dangerous in other ways... unbridled unilateralist warmongering from the remaining superpower, the proliferation of nuclear technologies to an ever wider group of states, and a continuing cycle of violence in the name of religious fundamentalism and political ideology, whose latest victims in London we mourn, along with those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay.

The internet connection via my mobile phone from Tiama is intermittent and slow, so I haven’t been able to keep up with my day job, working for Greenpeace on climate change, but we did hear that the G8 summit did in fact end up sending the clear signal that the Bush administration is out of touch with the rest of the world - so what else is new?

All for now,

Steve Sawyer - the Rainbow Warrior's anti-nuclear campaigner in 1985, and now head of Greenpace International's science and political unit on climate change.