Home - again.

I arrived home last night. The original plan had been to come today but several texts from Calmac made it clear that the weather could well affect the ferries today and tomorrow and they could be cancelled. As I had to be back this weekend and for appointments at crack of dawn on Monday and visitors arriving on Tuesday, I decided to make a run for it yesterday. I was obviously not alone and the ferry was full of vehicles. The ferry was actually the MV Isle of Lewis which is covering for the MV Loch Seaforth which is having her annual overhaul in Aberdeen.

Today broke with a stiff breeze from the North (the worst direction for the Stornoway to Ullapool ferry) but cold and sunny. As the wind rose the sea swell got worse. The ferry left Stornoway after lunch but it came past my house and when that happens you just know it's going to be a choppy crossing in places. Shortly after these photos were taken I received a Calmac text saying that the ferry would not be coming back tonight. There could be considerable disruption because the supermarket was short of some things this morning and the freight ferry won't be running today or overnight either and they do not open on Sunday.

The picture on the right shows the position of the ferry in the last of the photo sequence below.

Sailing up the coast and towards the rainbow.

Into the rainbow

Turning across the direction of the swell

Turning towards the South and East

Next stop Ullapool (nearly two hours away)

Today From My Window

A Rude Awakening

What's that knocking?  Who's calling me?  None of it fits with the dream I'm in.  What's happening?  

There is something very disturbing about being woken up by someone calling you and knocking on the bedroom door when you are fast asleep and in the middle of a dream.  One thing it guaranteed for me was that within seconds of waking I couldn't recall anything about the dream.

David and Molly left this morning for the early ferry to Ullapool.  Suddenly the house was very quiet.  Not that any of us is noisy but there was conversation between the three of us (use we talked to Molly and she responded).

No gardening today though.  Rain and gales interspersed with odd moments of sun and gales. It's August for heaven's sake.  Don't Jupiter or Zeus (I'm not sure which one is fashionable at the moment) know that?  They managed between them to conjure up a rainbow for me this evening though.

Thanks Adrian: Rainbows

I commented on the last post that the sky was filled with rainbows which we could see from end to end but which were just too huge to capture even on full wide-angle.  Adrian suggested how I could overcome the problem in his comment.  Here's my first attempt:

Thanks Adrian!

Since I wrote this post Adrian has had a go at the image with some contrast and saturation boost and the removal of the top of part of my garden plant house with the following result:

Vertical Rainbows

When, at nearly 10pm one evening when he was visiting last weekend, David called me very enthusiastically to drop whatever I was doing and bring my camera outside, I was met with one of the most spectacular skies I've ever seen outside of the aurora borealis (which used to seem quite frequent here but which I haven't seen for many years).

I am not aware of ever before having seen a vertical rainbow nor, for that matter, a sunset rainbow either.  The latter explains the former.

The following is from the Photocentric.net  page on photographing rainbows.

Sunset rainbows are special [because] the sun's rays are nearly horizontal, so the top of the rainbow will be high in the sky. In fact, a sunset rainbow is the widest arc you'll ever see from the ground: almost half of the full-circle rainbow can become visible....... Sometimes only the end segment of the rainbow appears, and if you see a photo of a vertical rainbow at the horizon, you'll know it was made at sunset (or sunrise). With a little geometry work and a sun angle chart, you can tell time using a rainbow at the horizon.

As we watched the light changed altering the colours of the clouds and the rainbows and the rainbows changed composition too.

Cold Beauty

It's been strange acclimatising to Lewis again.  Four seasons in a day isn't unusual for the Island of course.  But the cold wind has been a bit of a shock to the system.  This has been fairly typical: bright sun and then a heavy shower coming through.

Your Rainbow

I don't usually get caught up in things that try and analyse one's personality or whatever even if, secretly, I'd rather like to try. Anyway I was curious when I noticed My Rainbow at the bottom of Cynthia's Blog. So I went to spacefem.com and tried it with the following result. I'm not sure about the last sentence but the first two are how I would describe myself.

Rainbow

If you want the rainbow please don't complain about the rain.

Rainbow

Rainbows are quite common here. They might be quite common everywhere but we have larger skies in which to view them. This was Saturday's offering from the kitchen window.