All sorted!

Yesterday evening I heard that the Huntwatch base camp is going to remain in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island as originally planned. My hosts at the HSUS deem this town to be the safest place to coordinate the Huntwatch activities from. The more northerly lying Magdalen Islands had already been excluded as a possible location for the headquarters given that in the past some seal hunt observers have been physically attacked there. There had been some talk of shifting the entire operation to Stephenville in Newfoundland. I've got to admit, I'm glad that this didn't happen. Stephenville is truly in the middle of nowhere & I didn't fancy having to figure out how on earth I was actually going to get there!

Having received this news I was able to organise the rest of the trip and was able to change the dates the internal flights that I had already book, fortunately without incurring too great a cost. I'm really happy that the travel arrangements are now set in stone. From the very outset, the logistics of the whole operation have been a real headache. Nonetheless, I've been so busy figuring out all of the practical details that I've actually had little opportunity to dwell upon what I'm going to experience while I'm out there in the back of beyond. If you stop and think too much about young seals having their skulls smashed in, then you're likely to go round the bend.

I sometimes wonder whether I'm truly a few sandwiches short of the full picnic to have volunteered to join the Huntwatch! Don't get me wrong, I'm still determined as ever to go, it's just that I'm no longer distracted by all of the practical stuff, which gives me more time to think about the atrocious things that I'm shortly going to bear witness to. I've decided that I'm going to spend the rest of the weekend trying not to think about tortured seals, to chill out and try to do some completely different stuff...