heres a crop taken with the 70-300 nikon

I really like the compositon and colors on this. This one would be a good one to try and turn into a painting type picture in PS. Well done.

thx greg...I had a batch of 400 or so to go thru...easy to miss a decent one

Excellent colours and composition and I really like the black posts poking out through the turbulent waves. The foreground works particularly well but one minor gripe would be the small breaking wave right at the bottom of the image, I would crop just a little more off the bottom to exclude that as it is catching my eye now the more that I look at this photograph. Very nice result and thanks for sharing

Herriot

jk, there's either a dust spot or a bird in flight to the right of the buoy. You might want to clone it out. Good colors--agree with Herriot on the crop.
John