Serendipity. Caribbean DreamA catamaran sails by just offshore of West End, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Chance favors the prepared mind.

     This image is the result of one or perhaps both of these.

     A close friend lived for several years in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. On my first visit there we took a seaplane across the 40-mile stretch of water between Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas and Christiansted on St. Croix. Another friend and her husband own and operate Villa Margarita, a guest villa, on the north shore and we'd decided to spend a few days staying there and exploring the island.

     One late afternoon, on the west end of the island just north of Fredricksted, we found a little beach restaurant called the Sunset Grille and decided to stop for a drink and dinner. Sunsets are one of my favorite things to photograph; on this trip, like some others, I was marking a day's worth of photos by shooting nightly sunsets. Sunset Grille was aptly named - it was the perfect location to get a great photo if Nature cooperated!

     The restaurant was outdoors, literally on the beach. I found a curved palm tree that would make a perfect silhouette to frame the shot and settled in to wait for the sun to drop. I must have taken a couple of dozen photographs - Nature was definitely cooperating! - when this large catamaran started across my field of vision.

     Wow...I couldn't have planned it better if I'd tried.

     I continued to shoot as the boat sailed along the horizon, and in this photo everything literally aligned for my favorite shot of the trip! The sun, that bit of cloud stretching down as if reaching out to touch the mast, the light trail on the water, and the way the sailboat is framed by the palm tree...well, what would you call it? Serendipity? My "prepared mind?" Hard to say...yet this image, symbolic of a dream, seems to strike a chord in all those who view it.