Today we went adventuring in Harbour Grace and Mackinsons. More on that later.

One of the cool things that happened occurred when I spotted a beautiful beam of light flashing across Harbour Grace harbour and gently requested that we turn the bus around, head for the south side of the harbour with some alacrity because the light was falling on The Kyle (locally-famous, pretty nifty shipwreck).

So we turned and we hustled and we got to the spot from which I wanted to take a photo.

It was cold.

The wind was howling and the beam of light was….. gone.

It had completely clouded over in the 3.5 minutes it took us to get to the vantage point. So I got a mundane picture of the Kyle, which I post here for those who are unfamiliar with it. (I added the framing effect, to compensate for washed-out skies, skies which were not washed out 3.5 minutes earlier.)

While I was freezing my fingers off and thinking positive, sunny thoughts in the hopes of altering the atmospheric conditions (and those of you who were on the adventure with me and did NOT think sunny thoughts are in serious trouble; you know who you are), I spotted a wee bird. Actually, a whole flock of birds spotted us. This one stuck out as unusual, so I shot a bunch of pictures of him.

He’s an American Widgeon and while we do get them here, they’re not all that common.

He looked pretty silly flying. Sillier than your average duck, I mean, and those look pretty unwieldy in the air to start with.