September 2010

Great news - Britain's wind farms generated record levels of power on Monday, providing 5 per cent of all power supplied to the National Grid over the course of the day.

The Grid confirmed that 40.5GWh out of a total 809.5GWh was provided by wind farms over the 24-hour period, with wind output peaking at 1,860 megawatts at 8.30pm.

A National Grid spokesperson said that, including direct output from turbines not conected to the grid, "about 10 per cent of total electricity demand would have been met by wind power. It is a pretty big landmark for the industry."

The Northern Lights above the Esperanza © Will Rose / Greenpeace

We had a fairly quiet weekend on board the Esperanza - especially compared to the "all systems go" mode we were in last week during the action. Yesterday Babu, our wonderful cook, had a well deserved day off and some of us volunteered to prepare brunch and dinner in the galley for the rest of the crew.

Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, two Greenpeace activists known as the Tokyo Two, exposed widespread corruption in Japan's whaling programme, yet in return, they have been handed a one year suspended prison sentence.

Sadly, all four of our climbers will not be coming back to the Esperanza after all. Jens, Sim, Timo and Matt are flying home to Germany, USA, Finland and Poland respectively. Their personal belongings are still on board and they are going home in spare clothes bought for them by friends in Greenland. I'm sure they'll be glad to see their families again but we're really going to miss them on the ship and we haven't finished our 'Go Beyond Oil' tour yet.

We are still waiting for our climbers to be released but hoping they will be back on board the Esperanza soon. They are sorely missed - especially Timo's lovely guitar playing in the evenings. Anais is talking about preparing a "Welcome Back!" banner for them and every time the captain or our campaign leader walks past we keep asking "any news?". The answer is still no. Nobody knows exactly when they will be out and perhaps they wont be allowed back to the ship at all.

Handing out sustainable seafood guides on the streets of Tokyo (c) Sutton-Hibbert/Greenpeace

There's a common comment in this part of the world, often repeated on the internet especially, about sorting out the seafood problem: namely, we have to change minds in Japan.

Whilst it's a simplistic generalisation, there is a lot of truth in that. Seafood is a global commodity and a global problem. The big markets for seafood are (perhaps unsurprisingly) North America, Europe, and Asia.

Junichi (right) and Toru (left) working on their defence during their trial (c) Sutton-Hibbert/Greenpeace

Two years ago, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki exposed a scandal involving government corruption entrenched within the tax-payer funded Japanese whaling industry. They are on trial for theft and trespass, and are awaiting the verdict due this coming Monday.

This will be the first blog Toru and I have written together, as up until recently our heavy bail restrictions have meant that we could not be in the same room or even talk to each other without a lawyer present.

The verdict in our trial is approaching, and on Monday 6 September we will know what our fate is. We don't really know what the result would be, all we know now is that it is going to show the status of Japanese democracy. It's a long way from where it was when this case started - our investigation  to end Japan's whaling.