All is well aboard the Robert C. Seamans.

How often do you think about the ocean? As inhabitants of a coastal commonwealth and a historic maritime city, we do so perhaps more than the average American. The more compelling question is “how do we think about the ocean?” How would we describe it? Beautiful and mysterious? Likely. Awe-inspiring? Perhaps. How about imperiled? Damaged? Hopeless?

Thursday, June 8 marks the 26th annual World Oceans Day, an idea that emerged from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The World Oceans Day website describes the annual event as providing “a unique opportunity to honor, help protect, and conserve the world’s oceans.” It notes that our oceans provide much of the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, and help to maintain the climate that sustains us. Our oceans also inspire us. For one day in June, we are encouraged to acknowledge and celebrate these gifts, and to commit ourselves to improving ocean health through both activism and our choices as consumers.

How do you feel about rainy days? I have a hunch that most of you are like me, and far prefer prefer blue skies to drizzle and rain. Yet it is a pretty indulgent relationship with water, something we can afford thanks to municipal water supplies and secure access to it. Something that can quickly make this fact plain to us is a trip to an atoll island pretty much anywhere. I remember waking up to the sound hard rain hammering the tin roof of my friend Herve’s house on the island of Rangiroa in French Polynesia some years ago.