The Fastnet from the Air

The sliding door of the Irish Lights helicopter was open, wind pouring in, and the Fastnet appeared through the haze ahead of us. 2010. My first time ever visiting the rock. I had the camera up long before we were anywhere close.

Ireland's finest lighthouse, without question. For most of the year you can't step from a boat onto it. The sea around the Fastnet is relentlessly hostile, and what you're looking at here is a fairly typical day. Not even a bad one. In winter, it gets much worse.

What draws me back to this photograph is the colour of the water. Where surf breaks over submerged rocks at the fringes, the white water sits just beneath the surface and turns the dark Atlantic green into this remarkable turquoise. You wouldn't expect it twelve miles off West Cork. I associate that colour with the tropics, not with a jagged rock in Irish waters. But there it is. The Atlantic does what it wants.

Cape Clear Island sits on the horizon behind, the closest point of land. Often called the Teardrop of Ireland, it was the last thing emigrants saw of home when sailing for America and Australia. That thought always sits with me when I look at this image. It adds a weight to the place that goes well beyond what the eye sees.