July moon at sunset on Pete's Island

Pete's Island (also known as Grand Portage Island) is the only island in Grand Portage Bay, the Lake Superior bay on which I live. This island is about 3/4 of a mile straight out from my house and is named after Pete Gagnon, who used to operate a store on the island in the days before a highway came up the shore... the days when the lake was the highway. Because Grand Portage Bay is such a shallow bay, when the steamer "America" used to deliver supplies up and down the shore from Duluth, MN to Thunder Bay, Ontario the only dock it could land at in Grand Portage Bay was the deep water dock on Pete's Island (which also explains why the store was on the island!). To this day the cribs from the dock can still be seen a few feet underwater, extending out into the bay. The "America" provided service for 26 years along this route, until June 7, 1928 when she struck a reef in Washington Harbor on Isle Royale and sank. Today, the America is a popular dive site on Isle Royale, her bow resting only a few feet beneath the surface.

Getting back to the creation of these images... on the day these images were made, we had a series of several very intense thunderstorms pass over Grand Portage. Each storm produced fairly heavy rainfall and lasted about an hour, with the sun shining bright in between each passing storm. As sunset approached the last of these storms was breaking up as it headed out over the lake. I could see that sunset was going to be a good one, so I backed my boat off its slide on my beach and headed out to the island to make some images. When I got to the island there were some small waves breaking along the rock spit on the north side of the island. In order to get the vantage point seen in these images, I had to walk a few feet out into the water and shoot back towards the island. I had my regular shoes on (forgot to throw some sandals in the boat) and since the clouds and the light were changing so fast I didn't have time to take my shoes off for fear of missing the good light, so I just walked out into the water. The resulting images were worth the soaked shoes and wet pants :-)