  We show the existence of a thick thin decomposition of the domain of a pseudo
holomorphic curve with boundary. The geometry of the thick part is bounded
uniformly in the energy. Furthermore, in the thick part, there is a uniform
bound on the differential which is exponential in the energy. The thin part
consists of annuli of small energy the number of which is at most linear in the
energy and genus. The decomposition can be seen as a quantitative version of
Gromov compactness which applies before passing to the limit.
