Dear all

You might have wondered (or not) what happened to Tiama and her crew for the last year or so, and what we are up to at present. Well, wonder no more all will be revealed if you care to read on.

The new millennium started well for us with a charter to the Antipodes. The Antipodes are some of New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands. The job involved us filming the first sunrise of the new millennium and it was a spectacular one. We then beamed the image out live onto the internet via a huge inmarsat-B mounted on the aft deck especially for the occasion (which looked rather silly).

Directly after this Henk went up to the Arctic to go camping on the ice. He was part of a Greenpeace campaign against offshore oil developments in Prudhoe bay Alaska. The camp was at 70 degrees north and it was late winter when it tends to be a bit chilly so yours truly got a bit of a nip here and there. The campaign did make a difference and has has some impact on BP’s attitude regarding oil exploration versus the development of renewable energy.

We (Bunny, Ruby, Henk) spent the next 6 months in Amsterdam, Bun had a 6 month job there being very busy as the Nukes Coordinator for GPI, while Ruby went to school and Henk tried to be a good house father.

During this time Tiama was patiently waiting for us tied to mangrove trees in her mud berth, on Waiheke Island in Auckland.

Currently we are  working with Greenpeace’s Nuclear Campaign – being part of a flotilla of local boats that are organising to go out and protest in the Tasman Sea, between New Zealand and Australia – where there are large number of shipments of plutonium fuel and nuclear waste  passing throug on their way between Japan and Europe.

At present we are moored in Sydney Australia, just about to start a tour of a few south Australian cities with Tiama to raise the profile of Australia’s nuclear ambitions and involvement in shipping nuclear materials across the oceans.the

So as you can see we try and keep ourselves usefully occupied, and make a few waves here and there.

Tiama is great as always, still a wonderful boat,  we  put some more equipment and gear onboard, including an inmarsat mini-M and a inmarsat-C so we can now make phone calls and do emails at sea,  (no escaping for us anymore, although it does have an off button ha.).

Best wishes to all of you for the new year 2001

time is flying when you are having fun.

Cheers, Henk, Bunny, Ruby.