Pics of the week (another sunrise)

All those decades ago, when I made my first transatlantic crossing, I stood the four-to-eight watch in the mornings. At the time, it felt like waking up in the middle of the night, only to be rewarded by the slow arrival of the day.

I liked that watch, the sense of being alone with the ship, the sea, and the first hints of light on the horizon.

I was also keeping a diary then. Not that I was much of a diarist. I have never been one to go back and read what I wrote, and even now I am not sure why I bothered. Years later, out of curiosity, I did look at it again. It turned out to be 28 painfully repetitive entries, each one describing a sunrise in nearly identical words. The enthusiasm was real, but the writing was not what you might call inspired.

So here I am again, decades later, with more sunrises than I can count. This time, I am skipping the writing and adding photographs instead (don’t you love technology!). For truthfully, no matter how many times I try, there are no words that can really capture the way a sunrise looks from the deck of a ship at sea.

On this voyage, I often watch from the bridge with a cup of tea in hand. Other mornings

I sit on the steps outside my cabin on C Deck, where the ladder comes down. From there, I can see the horizon change colour, the sky slide from black to grey to pink, until suddenly it is day.

Another sunrise, another poor attempt at description. But that is fine. Sometimes the beauty is in the watching, not the telling.