Oceans of Hope
There’s few times I don’t travel with a camera. The reason I do is so when I see something in my journeys I can stop and take a moment for myself. Quite often some of my favorite photos have come from unplanned events. This is the fun of photography, you just never know what you’re going to see. Yesterday was the perfect example of why I carry a camera.
My day was like any other really. I was knee deep in work at my job as Quality Assurance Engineer at PhotoShelter testing new projects we are working on. With work over I was to meet my beautiful girlfriend Stacey for dinner at one of my favorite, check that, my favorite pizza joint. We don’t eat pizza that often, ever really, but Stacey was running in a 5k race the following morning and wanted to fill her system with a good amount of carbohydrates and what a better way then some Italian food. Anyway….. knowing there was a two hour window before Stacey’s shift would be over I decided to stop by a little town called Loch Arbor.
Loch Arbor is a tiny town down the New Jersey Shore. It’s just a little north of Asbury Park – everyone knows Asbury Park it’s the town Bruce Springsteen made famous. Anyway there’s a neat little spot here where you can park a stones throw to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s the perfect perch to see the sights. There were guys fishing, surfers, boat on the water, people walking their dogs and plenty exercising.
It was about 1/2 hour after I had arrived that in the distance, offshore, I spotted a large sailboat. Sailboats are not an unusual sight but what set this apart was the size of this vessel as I later learned was 62 feet long. Way larger the the average sailboat we see around here that’s for sure.
Grabbing my binoculars I took a look and seen the hull had a name called “Oceans of Hope“. Wanting to know more I grabbed my iphone and searched and I found out that the Ocean of Hope was a sailboat that’s traveling around the world. What’s interesting about this is it’s entire crew consists of those who have Multiple Sclerosis. Reading more I loved they regularly take on new “crew” along the way, all with MS, and all with varying levels of experience and levels of how MS impacted them. So if you were a sailing pro or something with limited sailing experience you had an opportunity to experience a leg of the trip which could last from 2 to 12 weeks.
When I had spotted the sailing vessel they were coming from Atlantic City and headed New York for a couple weeks. Their website had a neat tool where you could track the progress and see exactly where they were. They are regularly updating the website blog style along the way and reading about their experiences was a fun. As they sailed on by a passing shower triggered a small rainbow which I happened to capture on camera. If you look at the very far right hand side of the image you can see the Ocean of Hope continuing their trip north up the coast.
So in the span of about an hour I seen something really cool. A sailboat traveling around the world with a crew consisting with MS and a cool rainbow and a really neat sky. To see the rest of the images click here.
