By SEAN KINNEY

Local BP spokesman Andrew Van Chau (seated on the left) hears directly from participants in the Sea to Still Shining Sea event as he eats lunch Monday. 

About 400 people, organized largely through online social networking, turned out Monday to mark World Oceans Day by joining hands and lining up down the middle four blocks of Duval Street in Key West.

“It was a spontaneous outpouring of love,” event block captain Erika Biddle said. She hosts a show focusing on the environment, “The Ecocentric View,” on radio station KONK 1500-AM.

But it was also, for some, an outlet to vent their anger at BP, Transocean and others over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that started when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and sank two days later.

Local BP spokesman Andrew Van Chau took abuse from demonstrators as he ate lunch at Mangoes restaurant in the 700 block of Duval during the event.

One woman screamed at him: “How can you sit here and eat when this is happening. All of us, people that live down here, we’re” in trouble.

Biddle said someone even mooned Van Chau, who hadn’t responded to questions by press time Tuesday.

“You always have the bad apples in everything,” Biddle said, “but this was really meant to celebrate World Oceans Day. If it was a demonstration against BP, we would have been much stronger and we would have had different posters.”

She, along with several others in Key West, spread word of the Sea to Still Shining Sea event, with the motto “wear blue and bring two,” on Facebook beginning on Thursday, although Biddle shrugged off the title of organizer.

One group of middle-aged women in a rented electric car responded to the demonstrators by driving up and down their line and honking the horn and yelling, “Down with Obama.”

Biddle is organizing Hands Across the Sand, set for June 26 and spanning Smathers to Higgs beaches on the Atlantic side of Key West.