Once in a Lifetime 2/24/21

Really good photographers talk about "once in a lifetime photos." While I do not consider myself to be among that group (I am far from it), I have a once in a lifetime photo. Mine is the above photo of a sailboat crossing San Francisco Bay in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with the setting sun low in the sky behind a light fog. The photo was taken with a Cannon AE-1 using motion-picture 35mm file from the deck of a ferry in 1989. It also is a once in a lifetime photo given the negative was lost. This is a scan of the only print I made.

I have attempted to reproduce the photo on subsequent trips to San Francisco in the mid-1990s and a few years ago as evidenced below. But no such luck. It was the wrong time of the day, or the fog was too heavy, or the ferry was too far from the bridge, or.... A once in a lifetime photo apparently is just that: a once in a lifetime photo.