VIDEO FRIDAY and also, your moment of zen. A *big* thank you to SV Namaste for taking several of our videos back to the US of A and uploading them with fast internet.

This video is aerial footage, taken with a GoPro on our Blade Trigger kiteboarding kite, of one of our anchorages in the Tuamotus. If you put the video on the highest quality play you can see the coral under the water, the sand banks, and Estrellita floating in the middle of the beauty. Enjoy – we did!

The colors of blue in the tropics are so vivid and varied that they are difficult for me to keep in memory. When we left for N America I would tell people that the blue was indescribable. It is a color that you must see to understand and even photos can’t convey the intensity. Even having experienced and lived surrounded by these colors for part of a year, even having taken photos and videos, even after attempting to describe them while in the USA, the blues still took my breath away when we returned to French Polynesia.

It is as if your mind cannot fully contain the sensory input and so you can’t really remember the blues when you remove yourself from their presence.

This photo is from the village in the NE of Fakarava (Rotoava), Tuamotus, French Polynesia and the anchorage is nice enough but not particularly beautiful…and yet this is the color of the water when the sun shines.

VIDEO FRIDAY

Since arriving in the Tuamotus, our backyard has included an aquarium. Clear water, and various creatures sheltering and feeding on the underside of our boat. One morning I was sitting outside with my cereal and I dropped a spoonful in the water and this is what happened:

We love clear water. We love our aquarium.

A big thank you to the owner of Trilogy Yoga who runs yoga-by-donation classes daily on the bluff overlooking Long Beach, CA. Although I was rained out of the opportunity of taking more than one class I enjoyed my sunny day of vinyasa while watching boats sail below and it motivated me to do yoga more often.

We are on a downwind sail at about 30 knots true in a sea of mixing tides that are a light green color from the mixing. We have been doing 6-7 knots in the water with the main only, surfing down waves that cause a light shivering or shuddering sound and movement under our feet as we slide down them.

We need to jibe the main. Carol goes forward (tethered) to swap the preventer to the other side (yes, we should have installed a second block and second preventer so we can stay in the cockpit – another way we’ve become wiser already this trip) and as he is moving slowly to avoid coming off the boat the dolphins decide to come play*. As he turns toward me with the rope and the block in his hand, a dolphin leaps fully out of the wave behind him and I take a mental snapshot of its body glistening, suspended in air behind my, now very salty, husband.

- L

* I always imagine them saying to each other “what is wrong with this little fat whale that it swims so slowly?”