second day

I will refrain from mentioning names, instead I will write ###.

Our second day started at 5:30, breakfast and preparations etc, left the house at 6:20. There is a schedule that organizes the teams, cars and location. Everything is switched around so that no team is at the same place all the time. So mom and I were in two different teams today. Mom was in Hov and at the southern lighthouse with her team mates and I was in Vagur. We kept track of the boats (not many), watched the sunrise and enjoyed the company of a couple of sheep. Then we saw the "grindmaster's" speedboat driving by on our road (pulled by a truck). The Grindmaster is apparently the one who organizes and leads a grind. He had apparently brought it over on the ferry. Sine we had to go on a potty break anyway, we decided to drive to the town and past his house to see if the boat was at his house. It was not. We took a look around the west coast lookout post which was very pretty, with big cliffs. We walked up and saw what the Faroese thought about this landscape. They had turned the other side of the cliff into a dump. A sewer drain ended there and heaps and heaps of rusty metal was just tossed over the side. Very sad.
Today was also the beach clean-up day, organized by sea shepherd crews all over the world. So ### and I got some bags and started picking up trash on the Vagur killing beach. It's not really a beach, more like a mucky shore. We found every kind of trash you can think of, shoes, socks, gloves, bottles, cans, cups, candy wrappers, ice cream wrappers, juice boxes, plastic bags, shotgun pellets, buckets and tons and tons of rope, fishnet, yarn and plastic box wrappers. We collected almost 3 huge garbage bags full in two hours, which was the designated time. While we were carrying away the last bags we saw the Grindmaster's boat being put into the water. We went back to our lookout post and it was fairly warm, the sun was shining! My team mates decided to put up a sign saying "free hugs". So we waved and smiled at everybody driving by. We got lots of waves back, some with smiles, some with confused looks. We also got a few fingers and determined stares on the road. One man and his daughter stopped and talked to us, very nice. One girl stopped and got her hugs, she thanked us but didn't want to have her picture taken. I guess the ones that do support us are afraid of their neighbors/family/community. The Grindmaster's boat drove out full with people in yellow life jackets, we suspected that he might use the boat for joyrides as well. We spent the rest of the day there, mostly in the sun. When the Grindmaster's boat returned we danced like bimbos so they could see us being happy.

A note about yesterday: the whole Hvalba situation arose because of a supposed sighting from the ferry. But at around noon some Faroese person had told someone from our crew that a grind would happen that day. In hindsight we shouldn't have changed around the teams, because we showed them that by giving us false information we would react. And as to our tourist cover - first of all I doubt that there are many tourists here and if there were they wouldn't be sitting in this little town with no particularly interesting things to see, all day in a car.  :-)