Boats In The Night...Or Really Cold Early Morning

I got a text message from Arik(kid #2) on Monday night saying that he would be back in port around 5ish Tuesday morning.

I kindly informed him that I would be up around 5:20 to go to the gym and asked if could he please float around at sea til a bit after that so I could get down there to see them come in and take a few shots.

Just kiddin.

I did think that part though.

Really ...if you're gonna float around all night in freezing temperatures what's an extra 20 minutes??

Well, as it turned out, it was my lucky pre-dawn.

I messaged him as soon as I had my shoes laced up and was headed out the door to see if I had ...hehe...missed the boat (sorry couldn't resist).

The message I got back said:

Cupple miles.

It made me smile.

Arik will be the first to admit that spelling is definetly not his strong suit.

It was like....ya that's Arik and he's headed home ...for a few days anyhow before they head for Alaska.

So I asked what that meant in real time....and began calculating how long I had to get to the harbor and how many police officers might be lurking in the dark.

next message:

10 mins or so

OK so that's about exactly what it takes to get there from my house so I started going through gear in my head...

How long did it take to run to my back door, unzip the bag?

What needed to be reset?

As I hit the port frontage road I saw them headed for the mouth of the harbor.

I'd like to pause here and apologize to any of you who may have been camping in the port.

Yep, that was me speeding thru there at approximately 5:47 a.m.

I had a boat to catch.

Sorry about that.

 I took on the minefield of potholes fearlessly in the name of art, and motherhood, and getting there first.

It was at about this time that I had a revelation.

 Boats carry their own lighting system. How cool is that??

 I mean theoretically a person could do a really cool photo series based on nights in the harbor.

I started to get really excited about that idea....

Wow a year's worth of light experimentation in the dark...

This could be a thing...

Until a guy waking his dog  passed me and said...

"What are you doing out here in shorts?? It's 34 degrees!"

Which made me remember how wimpy I am about such things...

So way unlike the crews of these boats...who actually stay up all night before they come in, in the 34 degree pre-dawn thinking about what they need to do next....

I explained the whole headed-for-the-gym thing and he seemed to feel better that I wasn't quite as crazy as he had originally imagined.


Totally worth getting up and freezing your sneakers off for at least once in your life tho.

Who knows, maybe I'll surprise us all and work on this idea some more.



Happy weekend,

Cath