Wow...Easter on the Channel Islands. I doubt I'll have another holiday as amazing as this.

As if seeing this nearly untouched, beautiful piece of land off the coast of California wasn't amazing enough, on the boat ride over there, we saw what is commonly known as a "feeding frenzy" -- a few hundred pelicans, seagulls and what-have-you feeding on a huge swarm of tiny fish, which was also being nibbled at from underneath by humpback whales.

There were at least five, and they didn't just spout water -- they did that amazing, "rising from the deep", open-mouthed gape that most people only see in ocean documentaries.

Not only that, but out boat was followed by sea lions and common dolphins (beautiful black, yellow and white creatures that make bottlenoses look pretty dull). The dolphins seemed genuinely interested in our boat -- when the boat slowed down, they seemed to lose interest, but when the boat sped back up, they immediately swam up to us again. I can't help but wonder why they do things like that.

On the island that we landed on, I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the island scrub jay, a bird which is found on that island and nowhere else on the planet. It's a lot like the ordinary scrub jays we see at home, but its plumage is a much darker shade of blue, a deep, lapis lazuli.

I also found it odd that while we were in the same type of climate as the mainland, there were no crows on the island, only ravens. I had no idea what ravens were doing in such a temperate, low elevation (aside from plundering the supplies of campers who foolishly forgot to seal their belongings -- I saw one spilling the contents of a bag of candy on a picnic table). The only theory I got was that there were no predators for the ravens to compete with. Maybe the ravens arrived first and pushed the crows out?

All in all, it was a truly incredible day. Now, however, I'm just trying to compress a 2GB AVI file into a size and format that I pray won't be too tedious for people to play.