North Sea – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Skyscapes

Amy has invited us to thumb through our archives for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge #250 and choose skyscapes and clouds. I’ve found it impossible to be dispassionate about this. There’s something about these images that’s so bound up with memories that I can’t distinguish good photos from the merely ordinary. I’m transported to that place, that time, that set of souvenirs.

Take my header photo, for instance, which I’ve posted before, more than once. It takes me immediately to that special day when I was part of an evening boat trip quietly floating through the lagoons of l’Albufera near Valencia, while birds made their final flights as the sun settled below the horizon. It’s a memory which will never leave me, whether the photo is a winner or not.

Longish sea trips to the continent bring memories of languidly looking at cloudscapes from early morning till nightfall as our ship smoothly purrs towards its destination. Here’s one …

… or this…

Or there are those memories of January days in Cádiz. An unmissable part of our routine was to head to the beach at dusk to watch the sun slowly disappear into the sea.

This shot, from our time in the Balkans shows that a slightly neutral skyscape can be a perfect backdrop for a questing bird of prey. And this was a holiday of birdsong, wild flowers – and memories of a still wild landscape.

A quick visit to France, to the Minervois for a moody sky. This was a trip just a few weeks ago, when on the same day as this shot was taken, we saw tiny daffodils sheltering from the brisk wind.

I can’t leave this post without a local shot, taken as we walked a habitual path alongside our River Ure.

Life on the Ocean Wave: the good and the bad

We’re going on two virtual trips today. You might not want to come on the one where I took the featured photo. It was a channel crossing we made a few years go. Expected duration? An hour and a half. Actual duration? Six miserable hours which you can read about here. This shot shows the view as we neared the harbour in Boulogne.

Mainly though, a trip across the Channel – even the North Sea – can be part of the holiday. A chance to enjoy views of the waves, the sunrise and sunset, the salty breezes whipping at your hair. And that’s why I’ve chosen shots taken while at sea for Jude’s challenge this week: waves. After my nightmare voyage, I’ve preferred gentle rippling water playing with reflections from the sun, and vessels heading across the endless waters. That’s my kind of sea trip.

2020 Photo Challenge #43

#Kinda Square

Dirty Dutch Coaster and Other Ships

Travelling from Rotterdam to Hull the other week, on a grey and breezy North Sea crossing, I spent hours on deck, enjoying the busyness of the cargo vessels puttering back and forth, back and forth across the steel-grey waters. I was reminded on John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’ – the last verse of it anyway:

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

My memories of our trip are of grey seas, grey skies, grey industrial coastal landscapes, grey wind turbines. With red highlights – those busy ships: the cargo of lorries on our ferry: and an almost lurid sunset.

Click on any image to view full size.

Linked to Debbie’s Six Word Saturday, which I’ve been following for a while. Time to join in!

And also an entry for the Which Way Photo Challenge.

The wind, the wind. The sea, the sea

I love wind turbines. I love to see them set against the skyline, and marching across the crest of a distant line of hills. And this week, I loved to see them near the coast, their legs in the sea, a gritty port-side industrial landscape behind them.

These are wind turbines near Zeebrugge, near Rotterdam, and near Hull.