My first half second reaction was 'WOW!'
Then on closer looking I realized you have potential gold here but there's more work to be done before it is actual gold. Your source of the ship is great and I would have left the front part of the ship in the chop.
IMHO you should give this chop a couple more hours, enhance the blending of the waves, play around with color settings and try to add more sources to tell a story.
You could for instance use a radial blur on the bottle, I suppose this is an eye of the storm, add a couple of things flying around, to create a more chaotic look (remove the birds, they do not fly in storms).
I see great potential here and hope you will spend some extra time in this chop to make it great!
Not voted yet because I want to wait and see what you can come up with in the end, hope others will also.

oh the DRAMA!

Very nice, indeed! Looking forward to seeing those improvements you'll be working on (Holding my vote for later too, I'm pretty sure it'll be worth the wait!)

IMO reverting to something like Step 3 would be an improvement, with less yellow in the water, and not so much of a confusing dark mass in front of the bow. This can be a great image with the right tweaks.

Message in a bottle..

First version is more to my taste. (the one stored in the SBS.) The chunks (and I know they are suppose to look like broken glass) just don't work for me. They kind of look like debris that wasn't deleted/erased from another photo. But who knows, I'm completely loop the loop. Still a great chop

hehehe, can see the improvement with the blur... don't knock yourself author, it's a really great chop, be proud of that (great vision)

I think you have been doing a lot of work to better this image. For me, the flying glass looks ok, but not so sure about the water... is it me...or.... well, nice work, your changes look good.

There ya go!!! Congrats!

congrats!

Congrats again!!