Easter weekend was one of those times in my life where I had to sit back and the only thing I could do was appreciate how blessed I was. As soon as the kids left the island, we all packed our bags and jumped on a dive boat. The dive boat was called the Sand Dollar and had an incredibly overt American Flag and Bald Eagle across the front of it! USA! USA!
We dressed up in our sun dresses, played guitar, sang songs together and drank beer as the boat motored from Catalina Island across the channel to San Pedro in Los Angeles. The boat pulled up and we strolled a mere 50m to the front gates of the “Railroad Revival Tour”, an amazing music concert. Couldn’t have parked closer in a car! The evening was spent dancing and laughing watching three incredible bands: Old Crow Medicine Show, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, and Mumford and Sons in a parking lot in the middle of industrial LA. We had a group of nearly 20, picnic rugs, and the best attitude in the whole concert. It just simply rocked!
After the concert we got to avoid all the traffic and crashed on our boat. Throughout the night, the captain motored the boat over to an unknown island. The island was supposed to be Santa Barbara Island, one of the magnificent other Channel Islands. However, the seas were too high and we couldn’t get there. The island we woke up seemed awfully familiar… oh wait, that’s because it was Catalina Island. Yay, back home. At 6am before breakfast we jumped off the back of the boat on the West End of the island and went SCUBA diving. This was my first time diving in a kelp forest and we saw all kinds of echinoderms, rockfish, nudibranchs and opistobranchs. I found the most magnificent pink abalone shell I could possibly ever find. Epic find, if I don’t say so myself. We ate, dived, ate some more, dived some more (on the last dive we dove Gregorian Fan Coral covered caves – incredible!) and then headed back to Fox Landing where a keg of beer awaited us.
The rule was that we weren’t allowed to leave the boat until the keg was finished. With a bit of leniency by shifting the party onto the float, we spent the afternoon drinking and playing in the sun. We play games, jumped off the top of the boat, jumped off the pier, went for random dinghy rides, sun-baked and just generally had the best afternoon of my life! Afternoon turned into evening and we all crashed early to no surprise.
We woke up the next day, being Easter Sunday, and did an Easter Egg hunt, some Easter Egg competitions and enjoyed a family dinner where everyone cooked and joined in. I called my family back home on Sunday night and went to bed at an early hour. The following Monday we all awoke before sunrise and ventured out on the flat-top boat with bags of cut up fish carcasses that we had prepared the day before. We dragged them along the side of the boat in an attempt to “Shark-Chum”. This is an event undertaken once a season where the staff all prepare some fish-guts goodness and hang out in the middle of the channel trying to attract sharks in an attempt to jump in and snorkel with them. Sounds kind of crazy, I know, and all I can say is I’m glad we didn’t see any sharks. Nevertheless we went for a sensational dolphin bow-riding session on the way home. The water was crystak clear, and we rode with the dolphins for a good ten minutes (that’s a pretty long time for dolphins to bow ride!) as the sun rose across LA in the background. It was magical. Later that morning we all raced back out onto the boats as a Humpack mama and her young was swimming by. We followed the whales for a good kilometer before they dove into the depths. They were a Type 5 (very dark) Humpack Whale and there are no other words to describe it but magical! Oh, and we also found a dead dolphin carcass floating in the ocean.
ALL IN ALL, one of the most incredible weekends of my life. Over and over I kept repeating – we are so blessed! Can you believe this is reality? We are so blessed! Happy Easter everyone.