Whales!

That title is totally misleading, because you will probably be expecting whale photos, whereas you will not in fact find good pictures of whales in this post. This morning, however, the ship was SURROUNDED by them. Seriously, you could see spouts in all directions. We were steaming right through a pod of sperm whales, it was incredible.

We launched the boat and our photographer and videographer tried to get them on tape, but I heard it was difficult for them. I'll check and see if they got anything good, but in the meantime I thought I'd post a couple pics I took.

It's really hard to photograph whales from the ship, unless they come right up to us. This is the best pic I got:


Yeah, that leaves a lot to the imagination. Sorry about that.

Gratuitous sunset blogging

Behold:

Click on 'em if you want to see bigger versions!

And just for good measure, I thought I'd include a sunrise image. I promised a fellow Greenpeacer, the Oceans campaigner who got me on the tour in the first place, that I would wake up and watch the sunrise at least once. Well, I did, and it was cloudy. Still made for a pretty nice photo though, eh?

Filming them filming us

So I went quiet for a spell there, mostly because we were in transit for a few days, going to a point about 100km off the coast of the Cook islands where we picked up some journalists from Australia's Channel 7, apparently the most-watched news channel in Australia.

I like this meta-photo of them filming us:

After we picked up the journalists, we went back out to the high seas and resumed the hunt. The girl you see on the phone there is Tan Tan (or Tan², as she some times writes it to save space), our Chinese/Taiwanese translator. She is at that very moment speaking with the captain of a Taiwanese pirate fishing vessel. The captain refused to haul in his lines and quit plundering these waters, so we went out and removed all the bait from his long-line. My blog on that action is still working its way through the Greenpeace protocol, so I'll just leave it at that and let you check out that post later.

In the meantime, please enjoy, with my compliments, this photo of a totally amazing sky, with the Esperanza in the distance. This was taken from our inflatable boat "The Suzy Q" during said action:

A heli ride, a buoy on the high seas, and the moons of Jupiter

Don't worry, I'm not going to try and spin some fantastic connection between those three, other than the fact that they all were part of my day yesterday.

It was a long day that started at about 06:30 when one of our onboard campaigners, a Kiwi named Karli, came and woke me up by asking, "How quickly can you be ready for a heli ride?"

"Very quickly!" was my response, naturally.

I jumped out of bed, threw my clothes on, ran up to the campaign office to get my camera, and was out on the heli deck 4 minutes later. I got video of take-off and landing, which I'll edit up and get someone on shore to upload to Vimeo for me. But for now, you may content yourself with these shots:

Here I am looking super tough in my heli gear.

Our pilot, another Kiwi, named Donal.

Here's the Esperanza looking very small and lonely way off in the distance. This was one of the things I was looking forward to the most on the heli ride: This ship has been my entire world for the past couple weeks, but it's a fairly large ship so I don't feel too cramped. Going up in the heli, though, gave me a sense of just how small the ship is compared to the vastness of the ocean.

Here's the Espy looking a little less small and lonely as we approach to land.

The purpose of this heli operation (of course we refer to them as "heli ops," cuz we're that cool) was to look for this Japanese ship that is not licensed to fish in the waters of the Cook Islands, but was doing so anyway. We did not find that ship, unfortunately. But we did spot a little yellow buoy floating in the middle of the ocean.

So when we got back to the ship, we launched one of our Zodiacs, loaded it up with the diving gear, and went to have a look.

Here's the buoy. Looks harmless enough, but this could be a marker for a fish aggregating device, a long-line, or some other really destructive fishing gear.

One of our divers, a Brazilian chap named Gabriel, about to go snorkeling to have a look at the buoy and what it's attached to.

Turned out the buoy was just attached to a line about 15 - 20 meters long, not a FAD or long-line at all. We hauled it up onto the boat and brought it back to the Esperanza anyway, as it was essentially just a piece of trash floating in the ocean.

This trip was still totally worth it however, because I got to go snorkeling in the Pacific. It was amazing just how clear and blue the water was. Seriously, if a shark had come by, we would have seen it coming a mile away. It's incredible. We were about 5 miles from the ship at this point, so we didn't even have that obstructing our view whatsoever.

The rest of the day went by as normal — answering emails, editing photos and videos, etc. That night, however, we were lying in wait for that same Japanese fishing vessel, as we thought they might have come back under cover darkness, when they assumed we'd have given up and gone away. So there was a need to be extra vigilant, and I was asked to be on watch from 20:00 to 24:00. At first I thought it would be boring, but then I stepped out on to the bridge wings and looked up.

It was a very clear night, so clear you could see the Milky Way. So clear, in fact, that with the aid of our high-powered binoculars, I could actually see the moons of Jupiter. I wish I could have taken photos, but of course they never would have come out. Guess I'll have to keep that view all to myself.

Never did see that Japanese ship, in the end. Still a hell of a day though.

Whale Watch

As I sat in the bridge one day on my regular whale watch duty, I pulled out the trusty digital camcorder and shot this quick pan across the bridge windows. This is pretty much what I spend two hours a day doing — staring out at the open sea. It's quite relaxing. I usually don't sit inside though, there are "wings" off of the bridge, and I usually do my watch out there.


Whale Watch on the Esperanza from Mike G on Vimeo.

Of course, I have never seen anything on any of my watches. Aside from the occasional flying fish or seabird, that is. Once when I wasn't on watch I did see a couple dolphins swimming in the distance, so all I could really see was their fins occasionally breaking the water. I also saw some whales spouting waaay in the distance once — actually, we were woken with the news: "Good morning! It's 7:30, and there are whales off the bow!"

I didn't get to go out there and swim with them, but our photographer did:

He wasn't thrilled with the shots he was able to get, but I think they convey the general idea. That being: the photographer is one lucky bastard.

Swim stop!

I had an hour left to go in my daily watch duty when the captain came to tell me it was time for a swim stop. My first one! Yeehaw!

Swim stop is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. During a slow day, we cut the engines, open the pilot door, and jump out into the blue, blue ocean. I could go on and on about how cool it was to swim in the middle of the frickin Pacific, with no land in sight, but I'll spare you. The pics speak louder anyways (click them to view larger versions):

We also rigged up a diving board and rope swing from the heli-deck, of which I got some good video. One of our engineers was doing flips off of the diving board. I'll post the video whenever I manage to get it up on the net.

It was a pretty amazing experience, I have to say.

Take a dive around the Espy's hull!

This is Freddy:

Freddy is our chief engineer. He narrated a video for me that was shot by our videographer, Wooly (whom you all met in a previous post). Wooly wanted to test out the dive camera, as he'd heard it was shooting grainy videos (turns out he just had to take it apart and clean all the salt out), so he dove down around the Espy's hull while we were still in Vanuatu. I thought the footage was pretty amazing, so I asked Freddy to narrate it for us, to let us know what the heck we were looking at. And then I posted it up online.

Have a look:

Esperanza hull dive from Mike G on Vimeo.

We've left Samoa

We spent about three days off the coast of Samoa, but are now back on the high seas and returning to our campaign to defend our oceans.

We actually were not asked to do a whole hell of a lot in Samoa. In fact, Samoan authorities were taken by surprise when we arrived so quickly. We were there a little more than 24 hours after the earthquake and tsunami hit. The Samoans were not at all prepared for the disaster — in fact, the minister in charge of the relief efforts had only been sworn in two days prior. That meant that they weren't quite prepared to make use of what we had to offer. But in the end I think we still managed to do a lot of good.

Mostly, they needed our helicopter. Our logistical coordinator, an Aussie named Matt, and our helicopter pilot, a Kiwi named Donal, spent nearly the entire three days on the island. Matt was in their emergency response operations center helping coordinate relief efforts, while Donal was flying all over the place delivering supplies and checking on small villages with no other means of contacting the outside world. For the first couple days, ours was the only helicopter on the island.

Here on the ship, we pumped well over 1,000 liters of fresh water into collapsible jugs and sent them to shore. Donal spent a lot of his time delivering this water to various villages, as most of the fresh water delivery system was swept away by the tsunami. Samoan authorities said that this very likely helped keep several people alive while they were waiting for a steady stream of relief supplies to come in from elsewhere.

Each of these jugs holds 10 liters, and this was just one of 3 loads we sent to shore.


Loading the jugs into one of our inflatables. And yes, I put the camera down after this and helped with the loading.


The boat heads to shore, loaded down with water.

After a couple days of drifting offshore and boating water in, we came alongside the port in the capital city of Apia and gave several barrels of diesel to the Samoans. They'll use the diesel for chainsaws, to cut open houses where people might be trapped, and to remove felled trees, to open roadways and clear debris. They'll also use the disel in vehicles delivering supplies around the island.

The Esperanza at the port of Apia. I took this pic from the port itself, obviously — the only time I set foot whatsoever on Samoan ground. (But hey, I can say I've been there.)


The crane lifts a barrel of diesel off the deck of the Esperanza.


The crane operator, Flavio, a Brazilian, is our bosun (head of the deck crew).


First mate, Oli, and Ron, a deckhand and my bunk-mate, load the barrels onto a Samoan truck.

Australian and New Zealand military forces arrived to help with the recovery, so we put in calls to American Samoa and Tonga, but both said they were okay and did not require our assistance. So we're back out on the high seas now.

I have to say, though I wish we could have gone ashore and helped, I'm still pretty proud of what we did. No one on this ship hesitated for a second to help out — in fact, we were all really eager to go ashore and help, if they'd have let us.

And Greenpeace as a whole did not hesitate either. We immediately broke off our campaign and headed straight for Samoa even before we were officially asked to come help, and various Grenpeace offices made several thousand Euros available to us to do whatever we could. And unlike many other organizations that came to deliver supplies or offer aid, we didn't send a single photographer or videographer to shore to film ourselves doing it. We're environmentalists, but when disaster struck we dropped everything and acted first and foremost like human beings looking out for our fellow man. That made me damn proud.

So I guess I'll close with this shot I took, which I quite like:

We're in Samoa to help with disaster relief

We are currently drifting off the coast of Samoa, and have been offering any and all assistance we can to those affected by the tsunami in Samoa. When we heard the news, we immediately put in a call to Samoan authorities and altered course so we'd get there as quickly as possible. We arrived last night and are now working with emergency response teams here to provide whatever aid we can. Read more on my Greenpeace blog.

We are in what's known as Western Samoa, as opposed to American Samoa. Both were hit pretty hard, but Western Samoa was able to fast-track our entry.

I've been in the bridge with the captain all day helping with communications, but we're likely to be here for several days and there's every chance I'll still go ashore and help there. Turns out ours is the only helicopter on the island, and so far that has been the most useful bit of aid we could offer, though we've also taken several hundred liters of fresh water ashore as well, as their water supply appear to be contaminated.

Sorry I couldn't say anything before, but we didn't want to put this news out there publicly until we were sure we'd be able to help.