USVI

Monday night was beautiful.

I’m a night person and it just worked for me. The place I’m staying at is on a hill side about 810 feet above seawater. The house elevation is high enough to enjoy a stiff trade wind breeze from the east most times. The upper level deck presents an awesome panoramic view that faces south. Havensight (the cruise ship pier), Charlotte Amalie (town) and Frenchtown, are to the left. Submarine Bay, the airport and the St. Thomas campus of the VI University are to the right. The house is pretty much directly above the freighter/container ship docks, looking directly toward the east end of Water Island.

Monday night the moon was full and the view was a mosaic of white, black and grey hues. The sky was punctuated with scattered saturated puffy cumulous and cumulonimbus clouds. The silvery moonlight was shooting the gaps into the ocean giving the water surface a mercury like appearance. Off to the south I witnessed a huge thunderhead swelling and billowing just like the ones I saw when I was a kid living in Kansas. There were thunderheads to the south, east an d west with each storm contributing awesome, periodic, lighting flashes to the night sky. Each flash was like a directional color amplifier shifting the grey tones, in the effected area, up an entire octave or two. You have to imagine the massive dark grey ghostly shadows that the clouds cast on the moonlit water. Funny thing, the extremes, the black of the land and the white of the moon held fast.

The final part of this picture was the manmade white and orange tinged glows from the sodium vapor and metal halide lights. The lights dot the land and the sea marking buildings, roads, docks and boats. Just like dots on a map that mark cities and townships of the US eastern seaboard. The lights paralleled the shoreline with densities that varied with the pockets of commerce. Off in the distance there was a cruise ship lit up just like a section of town or one of the large hotels on shore.

Again it was a truly beautiful night