Sunrise, Sunset

This past Wednesday was a perfect day for both a sunrise and sunset with a bike ride in between. I have been wanting to go back to LBI to do a ride since it is not too far from where I live. When I decided to do the ride I decided that since I'm headed out that way I might as well go early enough to see the sunrise. 

It is hard to know what a sunrise is going to look like as the amount of clouds and humidity can change the characteristics of what it is going to look like. I was lucky as there were just the right amount of clouds to reflect to the sun but not too many to obscure it as the photo at the top shows. I took the pictures of the sunrise from Barnegat light so got a few pictures of the lighthouse while I was there. 

After the sunrise I rode the entire length of LBI. As the name implies this is a long island, 18 miles from top to bottom. There aren't a lot of road since the island is so thin but I tried to see as much of the bay and beaches as I could. Almost all the roads have wide shoulders so there is no problem sharing them with the traffic. Although at this time of year there aren't a lot of cars around. This is probably the flattest ride you can do in NJ as my GPS had me below sea level for most of the ride. There are no hills or even high spots on the island and a strong storm and a couple of big waves could turn this island from a thriving vacation resort to a sandbar very quickly. 

At the south end of LBI is top end of the Edwin Forsythe wildlife refuge. There is a parking lot where I stopped to enjoy the view and some surfers riding the waves. If I didn't have my cleats on I could have hiked down the beach to see some of the many different birds. Maybe I will come back and do that another time.

On the way back to the lighthouse I got a good views of some of the bay.

 This ride is a little boring at times as you spend miles just riding through the houses along the beaches and bays so it is not a ride I would do often but the views of the ocean and bays make this a good change of pace. When I got back to the start I had 39 miles which was a good long ride. 

Since it was an early start I was back by 11am and headed home to rest. My day wasn't over because the local camera shop was running a workshop on sunsets in Belmar that I wanted to attend. So a little after 5pm I headed to the marina in Belmar. There were about 25 people there for the workshop including a couple of people that I know from my community. I got there about a half hour before sunset and stayed to just after the sunset. 

The Belmar marina is not the most scenic place to take a sunset picture but it was fun to talk to the other photographers and get their take on how they frame a photograph of a sunset. I did manage to get a few good pictures. There was a couple on paddle boards that crossed just before sunset. 

My favorite picture of the day was a photograph of one of the other photographers talking to a guy that was fishing there. The reflection of the sunset was on the water between then and I thought it would make a good silhouette shot.

The silhouette came out good and I got lucky as the I caught the sun flare in the glasses of the guy on the right. If you click on the picture you will see the sunburst in the glasses. 

There are a lot of other cool places in NJ to take sunrise and sunset photos and it is something I enjoy doing. Although I have gotten some decent pictures of the sunrise and sunsets I know there are better pictures out there so will keep trying until I get the perfect shot. 

 

Summer Weather

I haven't posted in a few weeks because I didn't have anything interesting to post. The weather has swung between nice to ridiculously humid to raging thunderstorms. The last Thursday in August I took a day off and went to the Philadelphia Zoo as I had wanted to see it and try to get some good pictures of some of the animals there. You can see all my pictures here. Unfortunately the Wings of Asia exhibit was closed as they were introducing some new birds which is too bad as it is one of the reasons I went there. However in the normal aviary I found a cool bird that is actually a pigeon. 

 

I think if most pigeons looked like this nobody would mind them that much.  

While most of my friends were doing the Sourlands Spectacular last Saturday I just did a local ride on my own. It was misting in the morning before I started the ride and was still unbelievably humid during the ride. I'm usually not too bothered by the heat or humidity but I'm pretty sure that more water was dripping off my body than I could drink so I actually cut the ride short. 

We haven't had as many heat waves this year as usual so although this was the hottest summer for the world and a lot of other places that was not the case here. We have had fewer days above 90 than normal but it has definitely been one of the more humid summers. We also had some pretty good storms. We had a couple lighting storms parked over us where I could see the lighting hitting trees and the golf course around us. I suspect it might be the reason I had to replace a garage door opener last weekend.

The storms also made me cancel my planned trip to Gettysburg but I did take a day off this week to do a ride in the Sourlands by myself since the weather was perfect for a ride. It was cool with no humidity and the sky was dotted with clouds as shown in the picture at the top of this post. 

This past weekend hurricane Lee was off shore. It stayed far enough off shore so we didn't get any rain but it did send some high waves and rough surf towards our beaches. 

We went down to Avon for dinner on Friday night and stopped by the beach to look at the waves. They were 10-12 feet and breaking over the jetties. The waves were so big that they actually broke over both sides of the shark river inlet as they rolled in. 

However by Saturday afternoon when I was at Sandy Hook on my ride the waves were probably only half the size and the winds not as bad as expected. It was suppose to be mostly cloudy with 15-20 mph winds but the weather at Sandy Hook was only partly cloudy and the winds weren't that bad probably around 10-12. There were a lot of wind and kite surfers at Sandy Hook taking advantage of the wind and we saw a few surfers riding the wave. But when we headed west the go back home the headwind wasn't as bad as expected. In fact it ended up being a good day for a ride. 

Fall starts this Saturday which means summer is over but there should be a lot of good riding weather ahead.