go beyond oil

As our swimming action in front of Chevron's ship enters its third day, we've been stopping the deepwater oil drillers for a week now.

First the portaledge on their anchor chain, then the pod, and now swimmers in the water.

And we're still continuing.

A few days ago we asked you – our supporters everywhere – to suggest a banner slogan for the pod. We received loads of great entries and in the end went for one we really liked by  Michele Westlake (aka @crazyladywriter) on Twitter. It says: "Don’t SpOIL our planet".

The only problem was, with Chevron’s lawyers forcing our pod down, we had to figure out somewhere else to put it. Well, smack bang in front of the 228-metre Stena Carron seemed like a good idea, so when we jumped in yesterday, we took the banner with us.

Watch this great video of Victor, who along with Anais, was the first to scale Chevron’s Stena Carron anchor chain and start the 100 hour occupation of the ship.

Wow. It’s still sinking in. It's not every day you get to jump in front of a moving ship and actually make it stop.

Last night – about fifteen minutes before I was turning in – I heard that Chevron's drill ship, the one that we'd been hanging off for over 100 hours, had started up its engines and was heading towards its deepwater drill site north of Shetland.

Chevron had earlier hit us with a legal injunction, which said that if we got on the ship – with the pod or anything else – we'd face massive daily fines that we couldn't justify using our supporters' money to pay.

But we still had to do something. So last night as news came in that the Stena Carron was moving, Ben – our lead campaigner on board – tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was still up for going tomorrow.

We may have been forced by legal action to end our 100-hour occupation of Chevron's giant drill ship, Stena Carron, yesterday - but that doesn't mean we've given up trying to stop its journey towards a deep water drilling site off Scotland.

Just hours after we removed our survival pod from the ship's anchor chain, it left for a site in the Lagavulin oil field where it will drill an exploratory well in 500 metres of water.

So this afternoon we sent out an actions team in inflatable speedboats to track Stena Carron, now in open seas 100 miles north of Shetland. At 1.30pm they managed to put four swimmers in the drill ship's path, forcing it to stop.

After 100 incredible hours on Chevron’s anchor chain our occupation is over. The pod has come down. But we’re not leaving Shetland, yet.

I just got back from watching Timo and Naz lower the half-tonne pod, where with help from Victor in the safety boat, they used some more of their rigging magic to safely lower the yellow bubble into the rough seas. From there it was towed, bobbing and rocking, back to its home on the deck of the Esperanza.

As Leila explains, Chevron has obtained a court order to end our action on its drilling ship the Stena Carron and bring the pod down. Apologies for the audio, but the wind was picking up some.

Ok Twitter friends, it’s time to take action.

While Timo and Naz are out there hanging off Chevron's rig in the pod, stopping deepwater drilling, our politicians are out in Norway wrecking regional plans for a moratorium.

Yesterday we put out a message on Twitter, as soon as we heard from our German colleagues what was happening at the OSPAR conference:

Next thing that happens is Richard Benyon, the Under-Secretary for the Environment tweeted this:

They accosted you Mr Benyon because you're scuppering an important initiative to stop deepwater drilling!

Well the good news is that our occupation of Chevron’s deepwater drill ship has reached the end of its third day and is still going strong.  Timo and Naz are currently up in the pod and the word from them is that they could hardly be happier.  Last time I heard from Timo he’d just finished tinkering with the solar panels and was relaxing after chowing down on a self-heating veggie curry.