Chasing the Sunrise

I mentioned my friend Jay in an earlier post, and it was in his company that I found myself again, rather bleary eyed at half 4 in the morning a few weekends back. I am constantly learning with my camera work and Jay is a skilled photographer - his landscapes are just stunning! So we decided to set ourself fun projects to get ourselves out with the camera's a bit more and playing and we came up with the idea of photographing sunrise over the north coast.

We'd kept our eyes on the weather reports as there was no point in heading all that way if we weren't going to catch anything, so at the last minute Friday the 17th was named as our sunrise morning. Alarm was set for half 3 (painful!) and of course I hardly slept for fear of sleeping over the alarm! Jay arrived on my doorstep just before half 4 and then we were off!

It was all going fantastically well, the roads were empty, the chat was great and we were challenging each other to play good music on each others ipods and then Jay became rather distracted... It was just as we were heading into Ballymena that he pointed out that he had forgotten to check his petrol and we had only a few miles left in the tank before the car was empty and we would be stranded! Luckily with very few miles left to spare we found a petrol station. A petrol station that didn't open until 6am. It was 5:10am and sunrise was a 6! We were slightly disappointed but more thankful that we weren't stranded on the side on the road and miles away from petrol, and the sky looked like it was going to be a very dull sunrise, which was something that was completely out of our control.

So, tank newly filled we headed again to the north coast and then we saw pink appearing in the sky to our right. So the chat got more indepth as we tried to distract each other from the view - and then Jay moved his head back so I could see the most peachy orange Northern Irish sunrise I had ever witnessed. And yes, it was a shame that we had missed photographing it, but in other ways I am so glad that I at least got to witness it, so for that alone I'm still glad we made the trip.

We ended up visting Ballintoy Harbour, the beach where an old 1930's hostel used to be and all around the North Coast and it really was such an enjoyable day, especially the very much needed Ulster Fry in Portrush!