PORT DOVER, Ont.–On a breezy Lake Erie yesterday, two young people climbed a rickety scaling ladder up the side of a massive freighter and locked themselves to the conveyer belt device that helps to unload the ship's cargo.

A third used mountaineering gear to attach herself to the stern, just above the huge rudder, and hung there for nearly three hours.

Others, bouncing in rubber dinghies in metre-high waves, used long-handled rollers to paint white slogans on the rusting hull.

It was vintage Greenpeace. Three of the activists were arrested as they protested Ontario's energy policy by trying to stop delivery of 30,000 tonnes of coal to the Nanticoke electricity generating station. The ship, the 230-metre long Algomarine, owned by Algoma Central Corporation, was delayed for more than four hours. Later in the day, the Greenpeace vessel, the Arctic Sunrise, dropped anchor in the channel leading to the Nanticoke dock, creating a further delay.

The group's main message was clearly displayed in the rough, dripping words painted on the ship: "No coal," "No nuclear" and "Clean energy."

It's a critique of the electricity supply plan unveiled Wednesday by the Ontario Power Authority and an attempt to make energy a major issue in the campaign leading up to the Oct. 10 provincial election.

It was the kind of in-your-face protest that has been the group's hallmark for more than three decades. It had the feel of ritual. The Ontario Provincial Police pretty much knew what was afoot when Greenpeace made it known the Arctic Sunrise would visit Lake Erie. Police and an official from Ontario Power Generation, which owns the Nanticoke station, boarded the vessel just before it left the Welland Canal to enter the lake and warned the group not to trespass.

Police and Coast Guard boats and a helicopter kept the group under close surveillance for several days and accompanied the protesters to the freighter. But neither they, nor the freighter's crew, made any attempt to stop the Greenpeace action. Likewise, the protesters, circling in their four small craft, didn't interfere with the arrests.

Still the tactic remains valid, said Greenpeace spokesperson Jose Higginson.

"The core of the Greenpeace mission is non-violent direct action ... identifying environmental harm and standing in its way.

"You'll see a lot of interest in this type of action; it's exciting. And it lets us encapsulate the environmental harm being done."

And, she said, "it's not a coincidence that our ship is here in time for the election campaign."

Greenpeace, like most other environment groups in the province, wants an end to an electricity system dominated by large, centralized generating stations fuelled by coal or nuclear power. Instead, it's calling for a much greater emphasis on conservation, along with an energy supply generated by wind, solar, water and other renewable sources, and from small projects located close to where the power will be consumed.

The Nanticoke plant, on the north shore of Lake Erie, is a prime target because it's the province's biggest single source of the emissions that cause climate change, acid rain and smog. The Liberal government has pledged to close the plant by 2014, after breaking a 2003 campaign promise to shut it and Ontario's three other coal-fuelled stations by the end of this year.

But it's likely to miss even that delayed target because its new plan relies too heavily on nuclear powered generating stations to make up the shortfall, Greenpeace says.

Apart from the environmental issues raised by nuclear plants, experience here and elsewhere suggests that the ambitious building schedule can't be met, said the group's energy campaigner Shawn-Patrick Stensil. "We can't count on nuclear backing up the province's coal phase-out."

In fact, he said, coal consumption is up 19 per cent this summer because three of Ontario's nuclear reactors are out of service.

"Far from reducing our dependence on coal, nuclear power actually sustains it."

Arrested yesterday were Dominque Du Sablon, 20, and Emily-Elizabeth Storey, 22, both of Toronto, and Charlie Latimer, 25, of Vancouver. They've each been charged with two counts of mischief.

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