The Story Behind The New Banner Picture

Several of you said you really like the new banner photo, so I thought I would share how it came to be.

Early on the morning after the big storm, I untied Summer School and took her out alone for a quick ride to drain the rainwater she had collected the night before. If you're not a boat person, there are three plugs in the stern of this boat that simply use gravity to drain excess water once the boat is up on a plane.

This was a great excuse for me to go fast and also to check out the remains of the family camp. The water was wonderfully clear and I thought the pilings would be a great place for the kids to snorkel.

I zipped around for a bit, draining rain water, then replugged and cruised slowly to the pilings. I wanted to make sure it was safe before I suggested snorkeling it to the kids.

As I approached, the current inhabitants, a flock of cormorants, sat on the pilings doing cormoranty things like preening, sunning their wings, and defecating.

They did not leave their post (heehee) until I nudged Summer School against the first piling. At that point they flopped off and regrouped about a hundred yards away.

The camp pilings were acceptably safe for kid snorkeling. No dangerous entanglements or things like that. A few jagged broken pilings jutted up from the bottom, but I could take care of that with a safety message to my crew.

I zipped back to the camp and gathered up Emma and the four boys. The boys almost didn't want to go at that time. It was close to lunch time and they were hungry. Already grey clouds were darkening out on the Gulf. I told Junior, "Look at the horizon. This is your chance to have a great snorkel. The ocean hasn't been this calm since we got here. I'm tellin' ya', if you wait until after lunch, it won't happen. The afternoon will be stormy ... listen to the voice of experience dudes. Let's go have a good 40 minutes of snorkeling and then you can come back here, even more hungry, and stuff your face."

They took my advice and a few minutes later they were in the water and having a great time. I was itching to go in, but being the only adult, I decided to stay on the boat and monitor their progress. If I had put on a mask, I'd have been focused on fish watching, not the safety of my 5 charges.

They were having a blast and kept surfacing to tell me about some new fish or thing they had seen. The boat was a little outside of the pilings, so I tossed a line around one of the pilings and pulled Summer School close enough to step on to a piling which allowed me to really keep a close eye on the knuckleheads.

While I was standing there, alone on my piling, it occured to me that a pic of each kid on a piling would be kind of cool. I picked a cluster of pilings that seemed easy to stand on and when the kids swam back to the boat, I tossed out the idea.

"Cool!"

Okay, they were in.

Emma thought it would be a better shot if it were just the boys and decided to sit this one out. Like me, she's used to being behind the camera, not in front of it.

I took my serious shot and then they made up the poses. Here are the behind the scenes shots.

This one is a combination Crouching Dragon / Got A Little Captain In You?

This one is just All Boy.

This one is just good ol' Joi De Vie.

The leaping photo gave Emma and I a start. I told the boys they could exit the posts either by stepping back on to the boat after the last shot, or they could jump in between the two front posts. It was an open, safely deep area with no broken off pilings beneath the water. They wanted to jump of course.

I pictured them jumping in one at a time as it was a narrow space.

It never occured to me that they would all jump towards each other at the same moment.

You'd think I'd know by now ...

anyway, they survived, which is always good, and we got some cool photos.