All day the M/V Caledonian Star sliced through a choppy azure sea, much like a skater over slushy ice atop a deeply blue glacial lake. We are making the crossing from Greece to Sicily. We have a head wind, certainly not a storm, but the water is alive, rippling and rolling, with hints of foam and spray on every wave crest, exchanging oxygen-rich surface water for deeper liquid layers heavy with nutrients. It's the time of mixing when the Mediterranean Sea is renewed, indeed an oceanic spring after a long winter. Now the tiny plants, phytoplankton will begin to grow and reproduce in their thousands, million, and billions. Then the grazers, zooplankton, will appear, each a delicate crystalline sculpture, their voracious feeding an intricate otherworldly dance, their vast legions forming gossamer clouds drifting though Neptune's heavens. At ten fathoms the water is calm and clear and larger creatures wait for the feast. Here it is a gray world where the shorter wavelengths have been squeezed from the brilliant daylight, red is black, orange is brown, and yellow becomes a dark mustard. A nocturnal cardinal fish waits impatiently at the entrance to his daytime lair, bright red in the lights of our camera, an uncertain shadow in his natural world. He can sense the life above him, the growing crystalline storm, soon to be his food, soon to be transmogrified into his brood. Now, he must eat all he can before the female of his kind arrives, presents her eggs, which he will fertilize then gently scoop into his mouth where they will remain until hatching. His next meal will be their birthday. Then they too will join the storm, to eat and be eaten, their excrement and remains slowly drifting downward until the first winds of autumn and the storms of winter once again call them forth to be fertilizer for these vast briny fields, to once again become part of this endless dance of life.