The oil is here... :(

Cleanup workers lined the beach from Biloxi all the way back past Long Beach.

The tar balls (more like tar pancakes) that are washing up have the consistency of warm caramel. The workers are using large shovels (looks like snow shovels from up North), and they patrol the beaches looking for globs to pick up. This area is where we last took the Weta out - Courthouse Rd in Gulfport.

Today the wind was macking out of the East - 10-15 mph solid in the mid afternoon. Would have been a perfect kiting session...

Life is going to be different around here for awhile.

On the local news

http://www.wlox.com/Global/story.asp?S=12451526

Here's the link

Look for the F28 on the way out (motoring, not sailing).

It's also looking like the oil is not immediately threatening - wonder how long we'll be this lucky???

Maybe the last day of the beach as we know it

The forecasts are still for heavy rain and strong SE winds.

With that, the oil should be here soon (forecasted for a Tuesday arrival).

On the way to run errands, we took some bread down to Gulfport Beach and fed the seagulls. Considering how the weather guessers have been wrong before (actually multiple times a week - especially with regards to wind forecasts, as my many days of being skunked on the kites has shown), maybe they gulls will be spared from death by oil burning their eyes, nose, throat, skin or starvation because of the lack of food that isn't dead because of the oil slick (that is now larger than the island of Puerto Rico).

And now for the brighter side. This is funny - but not too funny (at least don't tell La I thought this was hilarious). As the kids and I got out of the van to feed the gulls, I gave some bread to Marlon to bait the birds our way. Well they came - the whole flock - and with piss and vinegar (bird shit actually) they got La back into the van screaming and yelling "those birds pooed on me!!!).

Boy was she PISSED!!! Good thing she was able to get it off ;)

I honestly believe that these gulls hate La...

This is going to SUCK!

When this oil mass hits shore, you can kiss life as we know it GOODBYE!

The local paper today talked about how one plan was to use the Mississippi Gulf Coast as a sacrificial area to allow the oil to come up on land so it can be collected easily (because there is a highway that runs along the beach). How screwed up is that!

It is now conceivable that I may not be able to play in the water again for the next 15 months because of this spill...

I'm pissed - not to mention there are dead turtles starting to wash up. What we can't see yet will start washing up later this week - dead fish, shrimp, dolphins, jellyfish - you name it, it'll probably be dead. The whole Gulf of Mexico will be a black pool of death.

More posts in a minute.

Holding Our Breath

Literally -

The winds shifted a bit yesterday - from dead calm at 0600 to SE as the sun warmed the area and to a steady flow from the E as the day went on.

Around 0630, a hint of burnt oil was in the air from the test burn offshore.

Hopefully the multiple groups addressing the nonfunctioning cutoff valve can get a diverting solution in place.

5000 barrels (210,000 gallons) a day is a lot of oil. And if you haven't read - the well head is 5000 ft down (nearly a mile!!!).

Life around here will not be so amphibious or aquatic if this slick/spill is not contained or diverted.

http://news.yahoo.com/video/local-15749667/19392387

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_usa_rig_slick;_ylt=ArQCifJqLNFQqsT7kyc3fOCs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTN1MWtwOHBxBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwNDMwL3VzX2xvdWlzaWFuYV9vaWxfcmlnX2V4cGxvc2lvbgRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzcEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA3VzZXNjYWxhdGVzcg--

Makes you want to ride a bike - everywhere.

Petroleum should be used for things we have not yet developed suitable substitutes for yet - like epoxy (but not disposable plastics - there are potato based forks out there - if we can do that, there should be no reason we can't make more everyday items out of biodegradable plastics; or not fuel for individual travel - trains, ships and larger trucks maybe).

Solar and wind with an emphasis on converting desalinated water into hydrogen fuel cells should be the way to provide our portable energy needs - this will take a cultural mindshift - heck everyone of us has bitten off on the idea of paying for checked baggage and meals on airplane flights. How did that happen? And how are you dealing with it - I changed my ways (mailing stuff and bringing lunch onboard).

Man has had energy challenges from the beginning - harnessing fire for warmth/security, clearing forests, burning coal, drilling for oil, dealing with nuclear waste - and at each turn there our technology has helped make the transition (when was the last time you saw a coal fired ship or whale blubber fueled street lights). Each leap forward however really represented a step backward in the carbon cycle - not how much carbon we were spewing in the atmosphere, but how far back that solar energy was originally captured and how long it has been stored - cleared forests for firewood or wood fired kilns/furnaces, coal fired ships, oil driven economies :: decades to grow trees, millennia to heat/pressurize ancient forests/marshes buried long ago by the changing landscapes, epochs to take the bodies of countless, tiny aquatic animals and heat/pressurize them into liquid hydrocarbons.

All these things are just captured rays of the sun. Today we can directly convert sunlight into electricity (and each of us can live off the grid) and we can go to Maui Tacos in Kailua and order a burrito and eat it with a fork made from a potato (not sure if they are still doing that - the potato forks were not cheap - yet).

But our dependence on fossil fuels is deeply woven - in order to make a potato fork, you need electricity and metal molds - the chain of energy to produce the tractors that work the farms, produce the metal that is used to make the vehicles to transport the forks to a market, the metal used to make the vehicles to mine the metal and the fuel to drive it all - most green things are beget from oil. Oh - and outside of the huge food distribution networks, there are hardly any smaller farmers (save the local farmers markets with people who grow their vegetables and sell their excess - the supermarkets buy from corporate mega farms that use metals and fuels.

So - fossil fuels are the web of our existence.

Sorry about the ranting - I guess I'm just getting bummed out now that the kiting/sailing/paddling/fishing around here is about to take a turn for the worst. Not to mention the air quality around here.

If you think PMS is bad, you haven't seen me drydocked (ok some of you have - Baghdad for 365). Speaking of Baghdad - I vividly remember the smell over there, burnt oil. So for more reasons than one, I am still holding my breath... hopefully the response folks can cap this well, that they don't see the need to light the slick on fire, and that we all take a step back and look at the way we live - where can we simplify and use fossil fuels where we have no substitutes and work to develop them so we can further break our dependence. We get all the energy we could possibly need every day for free from the big fusion reactor in the sky - every bit of energy man has ever used has come from the sun. Why are we not smart enough to cut all the middlemen out of the process?

THIS SUCKS!!!