The Green Flash

So I finally saw it.

I've heard about this for years, and have looked and looked and looked but I've never seen it.

It's the kind of phenomena you discuss late on a winter's night while having a beer with your mates in New York City. It may be snowing outside, and this kind of yarn keeps it real as you look to the future, and everything life holds. I've been day dreaming about sailing (and yarning about it) for years, almost all my years. I can't tell you how special it is to finally be out on the ocean.

Specifically, it's called The Green Flash, and it occurs, just for a second, and only when the night is perfectly clear and perfectly perfect, and only at the absolute precise moment the sun slides below the horizon.

Perhaps you need to have had a rum punch to see it, but I haven't been able to test the alternative.

And what's more, I got a photo of it. You may need to click on the images to see it, but it's there; start with the second to last one.

My camera has one of those fast shutter things that you might use at a fashion shoot (that's, of course, where I learned to use it). Randomly I was playing with it taking photos of the sun setting off the coast of Dominica. I was really trying to record how fast the sun sets in the tropics. Then, kind of daydreaming and not really paying attention, but looking through the viewfinder...

BAM! THE GREEN FLASH!

The photos don't to it justice. It's bright, really bright, and it sears into your subconscious, penetrates your soul and changes you forever.

You're left bobbing gently in the dinghy, darkness rapidly enveloping your world, dogs barking in the shanty town behind, the smell of fried flying fish and reggae beats drifting lazily out onto the water, and the rain forest insects starting that tropical low-frequency vibration that more closely resembles a throb, and you wonder what just happened. But you know, as you gaze around, that it was special and you'll never forget it.

And then it's gone.

27 December 2007