1st March 2020. Lofoten Islands. Uttakleiv Beach for sunrise. Later that evening my beloved Aston Villa would also get beat 2-1 by Manchester City in the League Cup Final (whilst I drank the most of a bottle of rum, you will find out that it had been a terrible day). That morning was our third of our twelve day trip to the Lofoten Islands and I had just shot the ‘Dragons Eye’. Close to this spot I was in the process of making another seascape, and to be honest it was never going to be an image worth keeping, but I was caught down a rabbit hole of trying to produce an image. Waves were coming up and around me and I was making images of the waves regressing back to the sea. It didn’t appear unsafe in the slightest during my time at this particular area. As I was about to make my last image a freak wave came up and knocked both my tripod with the camera attached off our feet. I don’t know how but I managed to grab a leg of the tripod. When I got back on my feet the tripod had two legs, the filter hold and two Lee Filters were gone never to be seen again, and the camera never worked again. Almost five thousand pounds worth of damage, not insured. Tyler Collins happened to be running a workshop in Lofoten and seen something I had put out on my Instagram story and had other people coming out to him later in the week so Ricky Linton who was on the workshop was able to bring out my Dads Canon 5d MkII and Andy Coulter, who is now a good friend, and a very good photographer (check out his work) lent me his tripod, filter holders and two filters that I had lost. The camera never worked again but thankfully the memory card and all of the images from the first two days were able to be saved. Looking back on it now, if the wave had taken me out to sea there was no way I was coming back. It has taken some time to realise this because initially I was focused on my loss of equipment, naturally. Now I know that I was very lucky.