Vessels of Opportunity (VOO) that you hear a lot about are boats ranging in size from small pleasure craft to charter boats to the large shrimp boats.  They literally go out to sea at various marshalling points and await directions from spotter planes, Mobile incident Command Center, or local centers to go somewhere.

Typically there is a larger vessel which has command and control over anywhere from 15-25 other boats in a marshalling area.  There are "jack-up" platforms now scattered throughout the Gulf that are stores, so to speak, that service these boats.  Out near the spill site and some other outer locations they actually have "boatels" where VOO's or other boats involved in the operation can come and drop their crews off for showers and a bed to sleep on instead of coming all the way back to shore every night.

I have a picture that I took inside the Coast Guard's rapid response operations trailer at the Incident Command Center.  This is a widescreen TV and shows every ship at the spill site, its name, and location in real time.  The transponder goes to a satellite and back to the Center.

Well, as I was writing this we got another update that will have more info in it than you probably want to know, BUT there are some very helpful pictures in this one.

The operator can move the info on the TV to any location he or she needs to go to-to see the location of boats, ships, drilling rigs, onshore or off.