The last two posts have had some pretty data plots (if I do say so myself) and some science talk, so I thought I’d take it down a notch and just post a few pictures of the kinds of things we are seeing down here. I’m sure it’s old hat to the folks who sail down here all the time, but I’m used to either seeing land or nothing at all. I got started in this business going to Georges Bank on a project looking at the links between cod, plankton, and climate – GLOBEC. We would see fishing boats periodically, and we could hear the Concorde jets break the sound barrier coming into Kennedy twice a day, but that was about it. After that I did a long cruise off San Diego in very deep water, where we didn’t see much of anything except the horizon. In grad school all of my work was in Puget Sound – a long swim to land the whole time, and now in the Chesapeake it’s similarly close to land (and substantially shallower). So it’s with much interest I watch the rigs as we sail past them. Pretty much everywhere you look out here there is some kind of structure. Some are just pipes sticking up, some are massive structures with helicopters buzzing around and boats tied up to them (no pics of those yet, but I’ve seen them in the distance). So I thought I’d put up a few that I took of some of the things we’ve seen.  More science and stories coming up soon.