Frantic five minutes

Yesterday I planned a trip to Mulranny for this morning, to photograph the sunrise, I had originally planned to photograph the footbridge with the sun rising behind it. Having checked out sun position, tide and of course the weather forecast the plan was finalized,. Mulranny is an hours drive from my house but I was being joined by my friend Liam who was coming from Co Roscommon to try some Landscape photography, so he had even further to travel. At 6am I looked out my bedroom window to see (and hear) heavy rain, I dragged myself out of the bed thinking, it will clear up, I have checked everything!! As I drove the first half of the journey the rain continued, but as we got closer to Mulranny the rain began to ease, and had stopped by the time we got there!. Now the only problem was the wind, which meant there were no reflections under the bridge as I had hoped, so we switched to the beach. Sunrise was due at 8.16 , I had explained to Liam that the best time would be the fifteen minutes or so before the sun actually came up. However there was no colour at all in the sky. but we set up our cameras and waited more in hope then expectation, the sun rose behind clouds and still the colour did not develop, but just when I thought we were going to go home empty handed the colour suddenly developed and we had a frantic five to ten minutes before the sun came over the clouds and became too bright for us to work with. But for those few minutes everything was beautiful, and all the plans were justified, and I think Liam became a convert to landscape photography.