Another Lesson in Expectations
I heard Wednesday that King Tides was making another appearance the next weekend, so Friday I packed up my gear and off I went to make the 3 1/2 hour drive to Cape Disappointment State Park. I knew the weather could be iffy, but I was willing to give it a go. I find it quite mentally therapeutic to make these weekend get-aways.
I had my plan in place, and since I’d been there a couple times before I knew the camp sites and roughly where I liked to park. I got in around 8:30 PM, set up my car for the night, checked the weather and there still looked to be a break Saturday at around 10AM. PERFECT, high tide was set for 11:30AM.
Not so perfect, I got up Saturday morning to RAIN and it never let up. The forecast had changed over the nighttime to full on Rain all day Saturday and would break on Sunday and be sunny. All the while I still planned on getting those big wave shots even if I had to adjust a little bit. Adjusting was ok, as long as the big waves were still a go. I found some amazing trees covered in fog, all the while getting totally soaked. Oddly I really feel like it’s good for me to be so into what I’m doing all the while being really quite miserable. I think it realigns me.
After the romping through the trees and the good soaking, I spent the rest of Sat and Sat night drying everything out, all in preparation for the big waves on Sunday oh and it was supposed to be sunny so the back of the monsters could be backlit too! I got up early, went and found a place that was open and had coffee (not the greatest, but it was coffee, and it was hot). Time to find my spot on the beach with the hordes of other photographers itching to get that one shot of the HUGE wave with the sun shining through the back of it. I arrived at Waikiki Beach (Not in Honolulu) and found a good spot and only had to wait the 3 1/2 hours till high tide.
As time went on there were no real big ones coming in, but the occasional larger set would roll in; just enough to keep me excited… I’ll keep waiting. At one point the young woman near me asked what I thought the chances of a big wave coming in, and realizing it was only about 45 min till high tide I gave my honest answer……. 10% I told her.
I realized in that moment, that the big one’s weren’t coming, and I had been standing there for 3 hours, gotten absolutely soaked the day prior (Not that I didn’t have a blast and Loved the shots from that day) and I was disappointed, yeah I get the irony of that. I was ready to go home, so I packed up my gear and headed home.
It wasn’t until I was processing the photos of the waves I did take, when I realized that some of them were really beautiful, that they seemed to have the same look on the surface that you would see on a glacier, the cup in the ice, and the way it looks like a wave too. I realized that in my disappointment I stopped seeing what was in front of me and I was missing “The Moment” I was in. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t get the photos I had in my mind I was GOING to get. But I got to meet new people and have a few fun conversations, go to a few places I had never been to before and saw other things that were just amazing.
It was a great weekend.
