just so you know...

I've added a few pictures from my time in the Gulf to previous posts.

in retrospect...

We arrived in Pascagoula, Mississippi early Wednesday morning. By 10am we had successfully unloaded the boat - everybody was hyper and happy as their family and friends arrived to pick them up. Those who still had to work unloading and storing all the equipment were being very quick and efficient about it, eager to get home.

Several of us had flights out later that afternoon and so rather than hang out on an empty ship on of the girls who works for NOAA took us all to the bar, where we decompressed drinking beer and playing shuffleboard to the tunes of country/rock being played from a jukebox.

I suddenly felt sufficiently exposed to the South.

The flight home was rather uneventful. After collecting my luggage I stepped out of the airport onto a clearly marked crosswalk with a green light for pedestrians. A yellow taxi honked its horn at me.

So good to be home!

The final haul...

A few hours before the end of our last shift we went out on the back deck to bait for one last time then an hour later we headed towards the bow of the ship for a final haul. For the past few days most people were starting to get antsy and very anxious to get off the boat and finally see their families again - you could tell how the mood on the ship was changing. Still positive - but ready to finish and finish well.
By our final haul (and long before) my shift was working like a well-oiled machine. And it's a good thing we were. After we had pulled in the first 10 hooks with sharpnose on the line all I could say was "you've got to be kidding me". But hook 50 we had caught 40 sharks - mostly sharpnose but apparently some of the larger sharks had caught on (pardon the pun) that there was a bunch of free food lying on the ocean floor in the form of smaller sharks which had gotten hooked. Quite a few hooks had a sharknose head plus a blacktip or tigershark attached to it.

We hauled in 69 sharks, which put us six sharks shy of the all time record.
Not bad for a last try.

back in the day when we played with Legos....

When I played Legos with my brothers we frequently built "space stations". The reason why we (or at least I) did this because then we could make cool but odd looking "cars"/flying saucers, platforms because in outer space, normal rules just don't apply.

You can imagine my surprise, when I saw my first oil platform up close and discovered that our Lego-designs weren't so outlandish after all.

Especially while we were off the coast of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi there constantly were oil rigs on the distant horizon or close enough for us to see helicopters landing and taking off.

I'm used to the ocean being a dark place by night the only sources of light being the moon and the stars (and there are SO MANY when there isn't so much light pollution) and whatever lights the ship has on. Here, in the Gulf I was constantly surrounded by illuminated platforms, rigs and crew boats. In some places there were so many of them I felt like they were closing and trying to take over.

On the other hand, looking at the amount of off-shore drilling going on in the Gulf and all the leases Florida has already given out even though currently nothing is actually being built... maybe that is exactly what is going on!