Cherish the memory

The most asked question we've been getting from friends and relatives pertains to what we've seen. I started by answering "everything", because it's just too hard to tell anybody everything we've seen. It would take months to tell, and then still they wouldn't get exactly what we've seen.

But the question remains, what have I seen?

I've taken a lot of pictures, about 2400. A lot of those are on my flickr site, and a lot of them also end up here. A lot of what I saw, though, isn't on it.

We saw the famous green flash, I actually saw it five times. I saw it twice one day, which is supposedly impossible. This happened when we were sailing between Martinique and Dominica. There was a nice big Atlantic swell running, and we were sailing on a close reach. The sky was bright and open, and I was looking into the sun as it set. The first green flash was on the down slide, in the trough of the wave. Then we were lifted and I saw it again, just as we were dipping down the next wave. It was just moments apart and I perhaps doubted seeing it the first time, the second time just confirmed what I saw.

After that, we saw it again, usually at sea, the last time as we were leaving the BVI on our crossing back to Europe. Sometimes it was bright green, then it was more emerald. I have seen other things which my mind clearly was making up, but this is something I won't easily forget.

It's also something I wouldn't even want to try and photograph, to not risk missing it. Some things are too important to take a picture of.

It's like that mountain I climbed in 1997, on top of which I spent the most lonely and difficult night of my life. After I got off it, I resisted taking a picture. Sometimes it's just like that.

Another thing I saw and the rest of the crew with me, was a night rainbow. On our first crossing, the moon was so bright and we got some rain in the distance. So we saw a rainbow from the moonlight, with all the colors, only much fainter and blueish. It's the first and only time I've seen this, and it seems to be rare enough to make me doubt I'll ever see it again. It was beautiful and eerie and I've almost told no one about it. There are things which I'll now carry with me for the rest of my life, cherishing the memory and perhaps feeling lonely sometimes because they're so hard to share.

But I'm grateful there were always people with me I could share these moments with, the good as well as the bad. I hope they will carry them along and cherish the thoughts they might have about us, about taking the trip, about being there.