Lucy on board the Rainbow Warrior
Hello and Welcome to the Greenpeace Guaranteed Weight loss
Program! The only equipment you will need is:
A 555 tonne ship.
Some big waves
It's Easy!
Step One: Position yourself on the ship.
Step Two : Position the ship on the waves.
Step Three: Attempt to eat something, anything.
Step Four: Need I go further?
Neptune clearly got out of bed on the wrong side this morning.
The sea has been rocking and rolling all day. As I'm typing this,
my chair is sliding from one side of the room to the other and then
back again. At good moments, the keyboard slides in harmony and at
bad moments I fall off the chair. Almost everything around me seems
to be in constant motion. Tomato ketchup bottles, jars of jam and
packets of ginger nuts slide in union around their rack in the
Mess. The books on the bookshelf flip from leaning-left to
leaning-right as if undecided about which is their best side.
People lurch with flailing arms around the alleyways, attempting to
get their feet to make contact with the floor - now it's there
beneath you, now it's not. We look like a troupe of blind drunk
penguins on their first day at ballet school. Everything is an
effort and even the simplest tasks turn into stumbling, staggering,
messy nightmares, as Henri found out when she tried to transport
her pudding down the corridor a minute ago. It didn't go well.
We dropped anchor at St Bride's Bay at about 7pm, but the
engines have just started up and apparently we are on the move
again. There is a Gale Force 9 forecast for tonight and we have
little shelter where we are at the moment. "Nowhere to hide", as
Marijke puts it. Hopefully there will be a more sheltered bay
somewhere nearby, where we can spend the night.
I'm sliding around like a banana skin on ice, so I'm going to
give up typing now and do the thing that I'm best at: get
horizontal in my bed. Even that's not as easy as it sounds, because
you still get bounced around with the whim of the waves. Oh well.
They say that worse things happen at sea.
4:32am Sleepless and shaken-up, I lie in my bunk, still trying
to counter wave-power with will-power and get to sleep. I know I
must have slept a bit because my mind is tumbling with fragments of
weird dreams, but it feels like it can only have been for a few
seconds. We are being juggled by the sea: tossed helplessly around
our bunks over and over and over. Its noisy - the waves are
erupting against the side of the ship and then drenching the deck
with a blow, and everything in the cabin seems to be clattering
around, as possessions get thrown to the ground and then roll
around for the rest of the night, with a predictable, monotonous
clash, clash, clash. Weirdly, I am sure that I can hear the sound
of someone clipping their toenails in our cabin. With a really loud
toenail clipper, or perhaps just really tough nails. I am obviously
going mad. I need some Sleeeeepppp...
Wednesday, 23rd October
It can't be 7:30. This has to be a sick and terrible joke. But
the Knock comes and the usual (but today slightly less chirpy)
"Good Morning Ladies, Its 7.30" rings through the cabin.
"Uurghhhhyrrrrr", I reply, unconvincingly. "Ladies?"
"UURGHHHYRRRR."
I feel like someone has put me through a tumble drier and then
koshed me round the head with a monster frozen tuna. I am
incoherent and mumbling.
Luckily my day's work is not too strenuous: I am given the job
of sorting out the huge stash of environmental videos that have
been on board since the beginning of time. The last time this was
done was 1992 and there are over 200 tapes to go through, many of
which are unlabelled. It turns out to be pretty fascinating since
amongst them are some old Greenpeace films from the 70s, which show
some of the earliest antics of the Greenpeace founding fathers.
These people are talked about in hushed, awed tones these days, as
legends and stories about them pass through generations of
greenpeacers into Greenpeace mythology. Interesting, then, that the
video evidence shows that, at least some of them were clearly mad
as cheese. In the 1977 film "Voyage to Save the Whales"
(recommended viewing for everyone) there is fantastic footage of
early inflatable training, with men in wetsuits inexplicably
back-flipping themselves vigorously off speeding zodiacs. There are
also incredible images of the first ever Greenpeace encounter with
whalers the expedition against Russian whaling in 1975, when the
Russians sent a harpoon right over the heads of the protesters in a
Zodiac. The Greenpeace anti-whaling message was the same as it is
these days, but they were a bit more polite back then: "Excuse me,
but would you please stop killing the whales?" said the voice over
the megaphone.
It is only today, after 14 days of being on board, that I really
notice the strangeness of living within such a small space. The
ship is 55.2 metres by 8.54 metres, and I haven't stepped outside
that small area for 336 hours. It hadn't bothered me at all until
now, but suddenly I feel a bit trapped, like my wings have been
clipped. I think I've got space-sick. That's the thing about living
on a ship: in some ways it is ultimate freedom because you can
travel the four corners of the globe, but on a day-to-day basis
your world becomes more limited. Onboard there has to be a strict
routine to life, and because you are at the mercy of the weather
you are powerless to really control your environment. No matter how
many blankets and chocolate hobnobs you take to bed with you, if
the ship is under assault from a storm there is nothing but nothing
you can do to make yourself comfortable. Sometimes you just want to
wrangle with the wind and shout "Stop! Enough! You re doing it
Wrong!", as if the weather was a bad driver sitting in the front
seat of your car, swerving drunkenly through the fog. And then the
skies clear and the grey thundering waves melt into gentle
green-blue bumps and you wonder what you were making such a fuss
about.
Thursday, 24th October
Today is my last day as a Rainbow Warrior deckhand, so its with
great delight that I learn that my task for today is Scrubbing the
Decks. This, surely, is the ultimate in authentic deckhandness. The
pinnacle of deckhandicity. Definitive deckhandism. I know now that
I can go home happy, secure in the knowledge that I somehow "made
it" as a deckhand, despite the fact that I remain completely
useless at knots, have failed to chip a single speck of rust during
the whole of my stay and am still not entirely sure what a grease
nipple is. Or entirely sure that I want to know.
Scrubbing the decks basically involves me breaking
my spine scrubbing hard with a brush whilst someone behind me
showers my back with very cold water. Meredith did warn me that I
would be getting wet during the scrubbing, but I didn't actually
anticipate being blasted with a high power freezing cold water jet.
I had been whinging about longing for a power-shower for ages…I
guess it just proves that you have to be careful what you wish for.
After four hours of soggy scrubbing, the decks are gleaming and
sparkling in the sunlight. The ship looks all new and shiny, and so
do I. It's probably the cleanest I have been all fortnight.
Between 8 and 12, I go on Watch with the Captain, Derek. There
is always someone on Watch during the night-time, whether the ship
is in port or is sailing, and there are 3 different shifts: 8-12,
12-4 and 4-8. Your task while on watch is basically to make sure
that the ship doesn't catch fire, sink or bump into any other
ships. Every hour you do a round to check out all the nooks and
crannies of the ship and make sure that there are no signs of
flames or excess water, that nothing is rolling around where it
shouldn't be and that the freezers are still freezing. The rest of
the time you stand in the bridge looking out to sea for signs of
small boats or buoys that have not been picked up by the radar.
Derek teaches me how to plot our course on the map and read the
radar. We are gliding slowly through the darkness down the Bristol
channel, and on either side of us are the bright lights of the
coastline as we pass Swansea, Ilfracombe and Port Talbot. Derek
explains how to recognise the signature lights of a lighthouse (the
light flashes different numbers of times) and to work out which one
it is on the map. He tells me about the different lights used on
fishing boats to indicate whether they are trawling or longlining,
and about the rules of the sea when it comes to crossing paths. We
listen to the shipping forecast on the radio and for the first time
in my life it becomes interesting. The monotonous, hypnotic words
which usually seem so remote to my cosy land-locked existence
suddenly spring to life and become something immensely relevant.
There are no gales forecast for tonight, but there are severe
storms predicted for the south of England at the weekend. I'm
secretly quite glad that I will have both feet firmly on land by
then.
Sitting quietly on the bridge, gazing out over the
treacle-black sea and watching the flimsy clouds sashaying across
the bloated moon is an inspiring end to my short sojourn at sea.
Tomorrow morning at 7am we will dock in Cardiff and I will sadly
say my farewells to the great crew, the gorgeous electricians, the
brilliant volunteers, the enigmatic dolphins and the greased,
painted, scrubbed and polished Rainbow Warrior. She's been the
perfect hostess.
Read more updates from the Rainbow Warrior on the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society
website.