Explain Your Screen Name

[Stoney Oats]

On my second deployment on USS Wasp (LHD-1), at about the time that I was drawn to this forum by Alan Gage's epic Nueltin Late Quest report, some fellas started calling me Brother Oats. That name has its own long and convoluted backstory that I still can't quite make sense of, so I won't get into it here, but for some reason I didn't think that was a good enough name. So I thought back to a fella I knew with the legal first name of Stoney, which I thought was cool as hell, and decided to slap that in front of Oats and try to make up a cool backstory. Well, I never got around to the cool backstory, so here we are.

 

[Seeker]

Seeker... the initiate in a vision quest, it turns out... I just knew I was looking for something, born out of an exceptionally painful chapter of my life that lost me a fortune, my faith, and pretty much stood me on my head for a couple years. Seeker fit at the time, unintentionally, and when I landed, I had changed a lot... and it still fit. So I kept it... it's my login on every forum I frequent, and the avatar records my first adult bear encounter, also my avatar in all forums.

 

[New England Waterman]

It’s an online moniker I have gone by since I had a blog focusing on my commercial maritime career, and now gets used for my photography Instagram, and some forums. Though for shooting related forums and online groups I generally go by Tugboat Door Gunner.

 

[Subvet]

Spent 8 years in the US Submarine Service "poking holes in the ocean" during the cold war. Intense at times for sure!

 

[Sedges]

As a botanist, sedges, a grass-like family of particularly difficult taxonomy, occupied my interest for a long time. I was working in plant communities that had an abundance of grasses and sedges and had to up my game to identify these to species. Both families have complicated flower structure and often need microscopic examination to ID to species. Most botanist avoid the families if possible, I enjoyed the challenge. I started using "sedges" as a user name on forums decades ago and in my old age it is easy to remember!