so much beauty... we are blessed!

So the sailing trip to Channel Islands was totally awesome! I had quite a few experiences that I'm not even going to try and explain because words and photos just don't even begin to do it justice. Lets just say it involved me, alone, scuba diving, night, total darkness, underwater sea caves at 50 feet deep, swirling water with lots of surge, and lots of little (and big) sea creatures to keep me company. Good times. What a world we live in. There is so much beauty everywhere, we are blessed.

Anyway, my underwater housing ended up not being done before I left, so I didn't get to take any photos in the water. But it was totally fine because I kept busy doing lots of other stuff!

I am almost done with a nice slideshow from the trip, but for now I'll just post one photo that I like and it has a good story behind it too. We were all on the sailboat having a good time and I wanted to take some photos after the sunset on shore, so I hopped in the dingy and cruised onto the island. That was fun trying to juggle 2 cameras and 2 tripods in the dingy without getting them wet. And the craziest part was getting through the surf safely so I could pull the boat on shore. I got on shore with a wet body but thankfully dry cameras. So I was shooting for about an hour when my friend Taylor yells to me from the boat, "Blaine! We all want to cook some lobster! Come back to the boat and lets get these lobsters on the BBQ!" Fresh lobster that I had caught the night before sounded quite nice, but I wanted to do more shooting. Hmmm... decisions decisions. Well I had the genius idea to set my camera for a 30 minute exposure and then come back later when it's done. Well, about 2 hours into the lobster feast I decided to putt back over and grab my camera from the island. As I was cruising on over, I thought to myself- Hmm I hope the tide was going out instead of coming in, because my camera was set up pretty close to the water. Well, luckily I had stuck the tripod legs pretty far into the rocks and sand because when I shined my flashlight towards the camera my heart skipped a beat to see the tripod was half submerged and the camera was just a couple feet above the waterline! Wow, that was almost a major disaster. Amazingly the camera didn't have a single drop of water on it. I hope my insurance company doesn't read my blog... haha.

So with all that said, here is the photo that almost claimed my $5,000 camera and lens. It's not an amazing picture by any means I just like the memories it brings back. The blurry object in the middle is our sailboat.


Stay tuned for a sweet slideshow... should be up tonight sometime!