Angry Seas

Last evening and this morning the ocean has been extremely active with good sized waves pounding the beach all night - sounding much like high winds and thunder. Seems angry at something.

So I was on the beach both last evening before sunset and this morning before sunrise, camera in hand prepared to record the result of rushing walls of water in confrontation with the shoreline rocks and man made breakwater walls. (Remember to enlarge the photos)

I thought, "I'll come away with some exciting new and unique images to display on the blog." So, this morning, after pouring through over 150 to 200 images, carefully selecting what I felt were interesting and cleaning them up a bit I retained about a dozen pictures - "unique and compelling images" which I planned to share with you on the next blog post.

This afternoon I was looking back over blog posts in previous years while searching for something completely unrelated to ocean images and stumbled on, to my surprise, quite a few photos of a turbulent ocean running into rocks and sending spray all over the place - many looking almost like carbon copies of the images I made last night and this morning - some much better than these!

So, it appears that I have done it before!  that is, made what I considered to be unique and compelling images and shared them on the blog. And, in this process of looking over posts of earlier years I also noticed quite a lot of photos of sunrises and sunsets which tend to look more than a bit alike.

So, what to do? Am I to stop posting photos I like because some of them may seem a bit repetitious? Having thought about the problem for a bit, I have concluded that each of these images, though possibly similar, has its own uniqueness and, contrary to a statement attributed to Ronald Reagan, "if you've seen one sequoia, you've seen them all", if you have seen one sunrise or sunset or the spray of one wave smacking into a rock, you have definitely not seen them all!

So, as you see, here in this post is the next set of similar, but different, images of a turbulent, roiling and somewhat frightening ocean relentlessly pounding the shoreline and sending water, spray and mist everywhere.
As I stood watching for the really big wave, (the "sétimo onda") and seeing what I estimate to be 3 to 4 meter waves containing tons of water, speeding toward me on the shore (with the breakwater between me and serious injury), I suddenly became aware of a certain amount of fear which reaffirmed a great respect for water, especially large volumes of rapidly moving water! It also provided a minuscule glimmer of insight into the power and potential devastation of waves much larger or an event like a tsunami!

While standing safely on shore in the shelter of the rocks and breakwater, however, I continue to find the visual and auditory effects of all this turbulence to be awesome, fascinating and completely mesmerizing. Can't get it all in the photos but I hope some comes through.