From Provincetown to Hyannis

Well … the first stop of our Cape Cod tour is behind us. We had a great day today in P-Town, with over 300 people touring the ship - that’s more than twice as many people as we had in Boston over the entire weekend. Provincetown is full of supporters and friendly people and it was a great place to start our Cape tour.

It is now 11:00 pm on Friday evening and we are navigating the tricky waters of Nantucket Sound. The very thing that makes the sound so suitable for America’s first offshore wind farm – its shallow waters – also make it tricky for a vessel of this size to navigate. We have a pilot on board that will take us safely to anchor in Hyannisport, just off the Kennedy Compound.

Tomorrow should be an interesting day. We will begin public tours of the ship at 11:00 am, however the ship will be anchored offshore and so we will run our RIBs from the ship to shore to bring people out for tours. Hyannis is also ground zero for our opposition – the group opposed to the wind farm. We have learned that they plan to protest us. This is great – the protesters being protested. They plan to have a flotilla of boats sail past our ship with signs and who knows what. It should be fun and I think it will make tomorrow’s event in Hyannis even more newsworthy.

Speaking of newsworthy, we scored a front-page article in the Cape Cod Times today. The paper's editorial board is fiercely opposed to the project, but they finally did a piece on our work here. It took many hours of meeting with reporters.

The other thing of note to mention is that this evening, as we were transiting through the Cape Cod Canal, which separates Cape Cod from the mainland, we had a team of activists in a rigid inflatable boat project images on the side of one of New England’s dirtiest power plants using a large format LCD projector. We projected images of wind turbines, images from our work in Greenland, and other interesting images to highlight the trade off between the wind farm and the really dirty power plant. Our team was able to project for about thirty minuets before the local police and Coast Guard showed up and escorted them to shore. They detained the crew of four for about two hours before letting them go. Thankfully they did not confiscate the $100,000 projector we had rented for the weekend. Whew.

Tomorrow will great, and I am looking forward to the potential conflict that may arise with the wealthy beachfront homeowners who plan on protesting us. Stay tuned.