27 May 1997

For the past week the MV Greenpeace has continued to research and document activities on the Atlantic Frontier. Unfortunately this has had to include a number of trips to shore to fix electronic a communications equipment. Though seeing towns, such as Ullapool, in the outer Hebrides and the views of the mountains that surround them is not an unpleasant thing to be doing.

On Saturday 24th the ship had an early morning arrival around the oil Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel the Petrojarl Foinaven, and the drill platforms and other vessels which support this in the Foinaven field. At the time a dive platform (the Semi 1) was being repositioned to lift one of the manifolds from the seabed which has purportedly cracked. Unforeseen intensely cold waters (down to -4 degree's Celsius) which sweep the bottom of this wild frontier area are rumoured to have affected this equipment.

So for the moment oil from the Foinaven field remains in the ground - well, most of it at least. Unfortunately the impacts of oil development start early and a sheen of oil was littering a substantial area near the FPSO. Not a huge quantity of oil, though it doesn't take much to impact the important sea-surface microlayer, and it's a sign of things to come if the oil industry does get a grip on the Atlantic Frontier. We were pleased to see as we departed that our presence had encouraged a team from the FPSO to take a sample of this oil.

So after observing the beginnings of the potential industrialisation of the Atlantic Frontier we set sail for the shores of the west coast of Shetland, and an eventual encounter with killer whales.

We had just arrived in the area near the island of Papa Stour and had launched a couple of inflatable boats to photograph caves along the coastline. At this point we were startled to see them emerge only some 30 feet from the boat of two male killer whales (Orca) - which was nice. The large male's fin stood a good 5 feet above the water, submerging slowly as the animal dove. A male killer whale can grow to nine tonnes, and this was obviously a mature male, exemplified by a slight curvature at the top of his dorsal fin.

After observing this pair for about fifteen minutes a second pod rounded the bend. This group consisted of two adult females and two babies. An adult female is easily identified by her much shorter dorsal fin, which grows to about three feet compared to the adults potential six foot. The two calves may have been either male or female (the dorsal fin at this early age is the same for both sexes. The animals were spotted close to a crabster (small fishing boat checking crab and lobster pots) and did not seem unduly bothered by our presence. Again we managed to trail these animals, intermittently (they can dive for up to fifteen minutes, and disappeared regularly), at a respectable distance, for about 10 to 15 minutes.

Our work continues on the ocean, heartened by the comparatively clean natural environment and the news from land that sections of the oil industry seem at last to be accepting the need to play a constructive role in the climate debate, including questioning the applicability of continuing, ad infinitum, the extraction of fossil fuels.