The men around town are tired of talking about Boobies. The blog hasn't exactly been gender neutral lately so let's cut them some slack, shall we?

Let's talk about Birds. Of the Booby variety.

Somewhere off the coast of Mexico (during my last rotation at work) we got birds. Lots of them. There was A Bird....and then there were Many Birds. I loved them. They dipped and soared and reminded me of one of my favorite poems.

I took Big Bertha out on deck and took as many photos as I possibly could - before I started feeling like they were looking at me - like the kind of looking at me that made me feel like my skull was going to get pecked open.

I managed to take hundreds of photos and was in full on Many Bird Love Mode.

Then day two point five of Many Birds rolled around. Someone commented, 'who spilled a bucket of white paint on the bow?!' to which I had to reply, 'ummm shipmate....that would be bird shit....'. Riiiight, needless to say Many Bird Love Mode was over. These birds destroyed the deck. When we finally rid ourselves of them I said to the Bosun, 'lets get some scrubbers and tsuji the deck' (this means scrub with soap and water.....nautical lore says that back in the day sailors sourced a soap called 'tsuji' overseas...my guess is Japan....this would be WWII era....anyways, scrubbing the deck has been called 'sugee-ing' ever since...and I roll with the Japanese spelling....). Turns out this bird shit was potent stuff - the deck gang had to literally scrape it off....as in with a scraper!

I spent some time on the interwebs and best I can tell these are Boobies - possibly Brown Boobies - and you guessed it - the booby jokes were alive and well onboard - can I tell you how many times I heard, 'I loooove brown boobies!!!!!'.

gah, it was amazing to see how close they could get to the water without actually touching...

the best part was watching them fight and stick their feet out for not so graceful landings...

....and there are more so, click through at your leisure!