Legendary

Not legendary in the sense you may have been thinking. (I may be on my way to being legendary, but I will admit that I'm not there yet. Even being the grossest and most disgusting brother in my college fraternity for a while hasn't earned me that honor.) No, I'm talking about something else, which will be made clear a little bit farther down.

In the meantime, a few odd pics sitting in my folder:

A photo taken on our first day out, as we hovered about 24 km out from the wellhead, in the company of a line of tenders standing by in case they were needed at the site. Not sure why, but the line of waiting ships impressed me quite a bit. That much heavy hardware, just idling by, is one small indicator of the size and importance of this whole well-closing project.

Another line of clouds, another red sunset.

Same, a few minutes later and closer up.

And now we come to the legendary part of this entry.

My mother loved Rockwood, Maine, and Moosehead Lake in general. The pine woods were bigger and thicker, the lake darker and wilder, the neighbors much farther away up there. (And that's where country folks go for vacation, apparently: even farther out into the country.)

She also loved moose. Had little statuettes of them, pictures of them, a few sweatshirts featuring them. It never rose to the level of a fully blown mania--say, like my childhood love of owls which led a cousin to think I was possessed--and a few other artifacts. One was moostletoe, a Christmas decoration made out of laquered moose droppings, strung along a cord like beads, with alternating red and green bows. If she was willing to put dried and hardened moose feces on her Christmas tree, it's pretty safe to say she liked all things moose.

She and Dad had many friends from college, a few especially close. Two of them, Dick and Sue Cox, lived on the Cape and, despite having spent four years in Maine for college (albeit in Lewiston--hardly a moose mecca) and having visited my parents several times up on the lake, had never seen a moose. Dick went so far as to disavow their existence, claiming them to be a fiction of Mom's (and it wouldn't've been the first fiction she'd put out there, if Dick had been right).

So Mom tried to rise to the occasion and document their presence. But there were two problems with this: if you aren't willing to tromp through the woods to seek them out, but would rather stay in your car, then you're pretty much out of luck unless it's dawn or dusk. Second, Mom would only use her simple little point-and-shoot, much like my little point-and-shoot except that mine is digital, and takes four seconds for one photograph because it tries to get the light and focus right.

One night, on the drive back from Greenville to their cabin, Mom and Dad spotted a moose, standing about 100 feet away from the right side of the road, at the edge of the forest. So Mom had Dad stop the car, and she whipped out her little point-and-shoot, and shot.

When she got the photo developed...you could see some grass, and then the shadowy edge of a forest. Mom claimed there was a moose in the shadow, and she was brave enough to show the photo to Dick and Sue. But really, it was even less conclusive than a UFO pic. She put it in her photo album with the caption, "Can you find the moose". It became something of a legend in my family for bad photography.

And so we come to this: my entry into the Sutherland "What the Eff is That?" photo pantheon. Behold:

Can you see the waterspout?

I saw my first waterspout today! I was upset with myself four days ago when one of my colleagues said she'd spotted one during a squall, I think while I was busy at my computer. So today someone raised the alarm, and I went bounding out of the control van to see.

It was pretty wimpy--actually, there were two, but that was the bigger--and never touched the sea. It poked tentatively down out of the cloud, and then slowly shrank back in.

We're currently on station, doing an instrument cast. The seas have risen noticeably with the passage of a front, possibly related to a new tropical weather formation southeast of us, still a few hundred miles away. The ship's roll is quite noticeable so I took the precaution of two Dramamine pills. About half of the storm track predictions have this thing--called a tropical wave, one grade below a tropical depression (which is one grade below a tropical storm, which is one below a hurricane) running right over us, bringing 25-mph winds and waves 5-7' tall.

Almost every trade has its version of machismo, and offshore work is certainly no different. However, big storms have a way of bringing out the alarmist in mariners:

When will we bug out? Remains to be seen.