june 6

[Landlocked]

The rigs must have improved how they do things out there.

 

[aquaticbiology]

the two rigs that were <125 miles out have both been capped - but the goop balls we remember were probably from the offshore oil tanker offload facility, with the new one in place things are doing much better. there were tar pieces and limestone rock chunks too from old washed out roads, and the ever lovely underwater phosphor rock mines are long mined out and gone too, moved south down toward tampa. ah, the old days of being a child on vacation in destin and later panama city beach, the anticipation, reading over and over zim's 'introduction to seashore life' and later all the rudloe books, assembling huge whole growth-series beach shell collections, identifying and cataloging hundreds of tiny microscopic sea shell babies in large tupperware containers of tidal sand we brought home, picking sea urchin spines out of my heel during finals week, the all-natural salt-water aquarium (shudder!), bringing home a mini-coconut that had washed up from somewhere only to have worms spew out of it about 2 days later! wouldn't give those memories up for the world.