Well THAT was Cool!

5

We are two nights into the Celebration of Light that Vancouver hosts each year and has hosted for 19 years now. Canada was last Wednesday and Saturday night was South Africa’s turn.

We had pulled our boat into the tidal grid at BYC for the weekend to get the bottom painted, props replaced etc, and a friend invited us out onto her sailboat to go see the show. We said yes (Of course!!). But late afternoon, around 4pm or so, some clouds started to pile up over the North Shore mountains and were pushing in from the East. Very strange in itself since most of our weather comes from the West. It had been so hot that I said I expected lightning….but I did NOT expect the magnitude of it!

It started to rain a bit as we got to the baot but we figured it would pass quickly…we were wrong, but then that’s boating…the good with the bad.

We got ourselves anchored out in English Bay and settled in to watch Natures prelude to the fireeworks…and what a show she put on. The lightning was streaking across the sky in all directions. We were confident in our safety out there since there wer many boats with taller masts than ours…. much more attractive lightning rods available.

But what really made it spectacular was the colour the sky turned…bright yellow and orange. Simply unbelievable. In a weird way… it was eerie and almost felt like there was something … terrible … about to happen… like a nuclear holocaust had occurred without our knowledge… there was an eerie quiet to the evening too….

I did not take the camera since it was raining and wasn’t into doing fireworks shots from the boat. Now I’m sorry I didn’t. But below are some amazing shots by others and a cool video of the day as taken from the Vancouver Katkam and a couple of Flickr photos by others… all of the photos look like they were through an orange filter… but this really was the colour of the sky….. it was surreal….

Oh yeah, and the fireworks were OK too… 😉