Tropical Diversion: Sunsets

There is very little in this world as inspirational as a sunset. Over the last twenty years of my life there haven’t been many beautiful sunsets. I lived in Loveland Colorado. On the front range.

Which means that I had big mountains to the west and I never really saw a full sunset. Since the mountains to the west were over a mile higher than where I was I would get to see the sun go down to about ten degrees. Those were my sunsets.

When I came down here I thought I would see a lot of magnificent sunsets. But that didn’t really happen. When we were in Bimini, We had Florida to the west and Florida often got cloudy in the afternoon. So at around five pm you would think that you were going to have a good sunset but by six o'clock the sun would be behind a cloud.

In all of the virgin islands it was the same. Except this time is was the rain forest on Puerto Rico that wouldn't let me see the sunsets. The rain forest in Puerto Rico is about 2500 feet up and always has a cloud on top of it. From anywhere in the US, British or Spanish Virgin islands the sun would set over that cloud.

The only exception to that was St Croix. There we didn't have the rain forest to the west so we did see one pretty good sunset.

Last Thursday we arrived in St Martin. Nothing to the west. I can attest to that because we sailed over one hundred miles of ocean on the way here. And guess what, we have fantastic sunsets. Out of the last five days we've been here we’ve seen four excellent sunsets.

There is a restaurant in Ocean City Maryland called Fager’s Island, They play the eighteen twelve overture when the sun goes down and when the sun sets the cannons go off. I think I will get the music and start playing it.

I’m look forward to many more exceptional sunsets as we head down towards Grenada.