Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay are a wonderful location to live near. Many years ago I joined the Scuba Club at college and got my scuba diving certification. That summer, 4 friends and I drove to California and dove at Fort Ross north of San Francisco and then Carmel near Monterey at the bottom of the Monterey Bay. The diving was great but I had no idea that 25 years later I would be living 15 minutes from the bay and less than an hour from the location of our great dive in Carmel.
The ocean has always been an invigorating and inspiring location for me. I love the sights, smells and sounds of being beside the ocean – and being out on it, my ocean passion is yacht racing. While I have not pursued surfing, this area is well known for that and it is an extreme rarity to find oneself near the ocean and not see at least one surfer.
This evening while walking on the coastal path the lighting in this scene caught my eye. Dark and moody, the lighting on the points of land caught my eye while watching the remaining surfers waiting for a good wave as they got farther and farther apart in the dying evening. Facing east, the sunset was behind me but some of it was reflected in the eastern sky.