Bay as Port

image50The primary focus area for Shrimp Boat Projects is Galveston Bay, the second most productive bay in the United States (after the Chesapeake Bay) and the gateway to the Port of Houston: the busiest port in the United States since 2004. Galveston Bay may be many things to many people– a fragile ecosystem, a critical shipping lane, a prime location for oil refineries and terminus for oil pipelines, a thriving shrimp fishery, to name a few– but for harbor pilot Louis Vest, Galveston Bay appears to be first and foremost the gateway to a thriving Port. Louis, aka OneEighteen on the photo-sharing website Flickr, has been one of our favorite chroniclers of life in and around the port for years. His incredible photos of this area, taken from the perspective of someone working on the water at all hours of the day, let us access a place that exists both extremely close to a major metropolis, but remains mysterious world largely unknown to the average local resident.