You in particular

Hurricane Isaias forecast from the National Weather
Service. The red area is Destin - Fort Walton Beach, FL.

I am supposed to be diving right now. 

I packed my rebreather this week, put my wetsuit in a suitcase, made sure I grabbed my fins. But fate would not have it be so. In the year of a Super El Niño, when there were supposed to be a lower number of hurricanes in the Atlantic than normal, my trip still got weathered out. There was one hurricane. It made landfall exactly where I was planning to go. Two days before I was supposed to be there. If the universe is sending a message, it is addressed to me in particular. 

I left the rebreather at home, delayed my flight by a few days, and then made my way to Destin - Fort Walton Beach, Florida. We may not be diving this week - I'm told the visibility offshore is so bad, you can't see your own hands underwater - but there are still plenty of reasons for me to be here. 

Ladies and gentlemen, the SS United States is going to be deployed the second week of November. 

That's right, a full year after it was originally predicted, the world's largest artificial reef has cleared all legal hurdles, passed all final inspections, and been readied for deployment. The Okaloosa County team has accomplished the seemingly impossible. I am beyond excited to see the ship finally reach her new home at 55 m depth. When the ship slips beneath the waves, my experiment begins: I plan to track development of the biological community on SS United States annually for as long as I can - hopefully a decade or more. This is a one-time opportunity to watch as a brand-new habitat becomes an oasis of biodiversity. 

Seen in Alex's office

As we ramp up to deployment day, there is a lot of planning to do. Alex, my collaborator within Okaloosa County, connected me with a local dive shop to start the conversation about our baseline sampling operation. My brain keeps churning with all the various scenarios for the operation - dive personnel, boat availability, weather windows, and how to get a truckload of sampling gear down to the Gulf coast. It's like there's a chess board in my head, and every piece is moving. 

With just a month to go, I trust the pieces will fall into place rather quickly. Pretty soon, I'll be back down here for deployment day. And that, my friends, will be a great day for us in particular.