Who are you, dear reader, and why are you here?

According to what you wrote in the guestbook after our first issue, you live all over the world—Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, Germany, Norway, France, Nigeria, India, and Australia, as well as all of the coasts and corners of the United States. You're a researcher, a teacher, a student, an administrator, a boater, a fisher, a government worker, a businessperson, an artist, a writer . . . You live within sight of the ocean, perhaps are on a research journey right now—and you live in the city, the prairie, the mountains, and the desert, far from the ocean but still carrying it in your heart.

Which brings us to the second part of the question: Why are you here? A number of you couldn't help but share your feelings of personal or ecological loss of a beloved place in or by the sea. For Phyllis Singler of Philadelphia, the loss was personal and recent: "I just left Long Island after living there my entire life." Writing from Santa Rosa, California, Anne Fitzgerald evoked a wistful sense of disconnection from her family's history: "For 5 generations my father's family left the shores of Newfoundland for the sea." Mary Scriver, living in Montana, reflected on the absence of the sea in both personal and geological perspectives: "I'm living on the floor of an ancient sea, now dry. Now it is a sea of grass. I used to live on the Pacific—just as cold, just as seething." Perhaps most poignant was Judith Hemenway's report of the destructive changes she has observed in the sea over her lifetime: "I've been a scuba diver for 33 years now, and have witnessed first hand the decline of the ocean. About 2 years ago, I dived the kelp beds off of Point Loma in San Diego, an area that I had first dived in 1973. My young companions were very enthusiastic about the dive. I just cried."

For all who come with such feelings of loss, in your own life or in the life of the seas, may the words and images collected here offer resilience, reconnection, and hope. Welcome to the second issue of Sea Stories!

Steven Pavlos Holmes, Editor and Project Consultant
Karla Linn Merrifield, Contributing Editor
Mercedes Lee, Project Director
The staff of Blue Ocean Institute
Paul McGeiver, Site Design/Construction