A glowing morning fog hides the ocean. Cormorants stand upright on rocks in the little inlet, their wings outstretched. A line of ducks shelter on the calm water. The pines on Fox Island fade in and out of sight. We hear the low chugging motors of the lobster boats first and then watch their shadowy presence skitter from buoy to buoy, cages pulled up and then splashing back.
Island Coast: Shari Ciomei
The sun emerges: rock, sea, sky, wind, light — blue sky, blue sea. The tide comes creeping in, the sun angling west now and throwing the shadows of the pines. A big boat hoisting a red sail glides north a mile off shore.
Edward Hopper: Rooms By the Sea
The sun’s arc moves northeast to southwest. Two dogs hover in the water, belly high, looking at us, waiting. Big white gulls rest on one blade of granite. A juvenile osprey, fish in its 
talons, circles and cries again and again. On Fox Island another osprey tilts forward in its nest, feathers flaring to the side of its head and its dark beak. Through the binoculars it looks like Groucho Marx, cigar in mouth, black stage paint moustache shining.
Eric Hopkins: Granite Points and Wave Pattern
Evening comes onrushing with the tide, now flush, the inlet full of waves. On the horizon line an orange-pink rests above a deep charcoal lavender. A steady south wind, an empty sea. Thousands of feet above us an airliner runs above the rising moon, yellow-silver in the full blast of a sun which has vanished westward, far from our sight. The darkness feels physical, a living thing sliding toward the coast. We are overcome by the deepest blue-grey and then moon-glow and the sound of waves against the rocks.
Past midnight the whole world has become a deep violet-blue; the island is now only a shadowed thick mass jagged with the tips of the pines. High clouds have arrived. The moonlight refracts through them and then granite ledges seem to emit their own ambient light.
Winslow Homer: Summer Night
Mesmerized, we cannot turn away, we do not wish to sleep for such beauty might change a life — moon, sea, stars, waves, a wind light on the waters.
