Snorkel Fakarava, and the Absent Minded Baker

Cruising life is difficult to explain. Boats make life intensely complex and frighteningly simple at the same time. A lot of the day is centered around food, and food can make or break the day, it seems. We talk a lot about food with other cruisers, have frequent potlucks and share recipes with other boats. It's difficult not to continuously write about food.

This morning started out pretty awesome with breakfast: cinnamon rolls. Osprey had a really tasty recipe in Cooks Afloat and they looked pretty simple. Breakfasts tend to be pretty bready but funny enough we haven't had cinnamon rolls yet. Osprey was bringing a French press for coffee in exchange for breakfast so we needed two batches and I decided to get creative: a sweet potato batch and a coconut batch. The mashed sweet potatoes were mixed in with the dough, then rolled out, filled, rolled up and cut like normal. No problem.

With the coconut ones I rolled the dough out and put in the usual filling stuffs for cinnamon rolls: sugar, butter, raisins, then added the coconut and went about that whole business of putting them in the oven. Notice something missing from that list of ingredients? Something important to cinnamon rolls--cinnamon! I made cinnamon rolls and forgot the cinnamon! To remedy this I sprinkled a lot on the top and put a lot of cinnamon in the icing. I was even tempted to sprinkle some in the coffee grounds.

Luckily the rolls tasted pretty great, even without cinnamon in the filling. Ben might revoke my baking privileges if I keep forgetting the main ingredient. (One of the first breakfasts I made on the boat was pancakes and I forgot baking soda. Not fluffy.)

We just snorkeled around the boat today--hopefully we'll make it to the pass tomorrow. There are plenty of coral heads and sea creatures to keep us entertained for awhile: just watching the sharks swimming near us keeps us alert! They're all black tips which aren't very curious about humans unless you're fishing.

Aside from sharks we saw an eagle ray (really cool!), some really awesome clams that looked like they had purple lips and a bunch of grouper. Word on the street is that this pass is the second largest congregation of grouper that spawn in a couple of days. You can see rivers of migrating grouper and the sharks that follow them. It's interesting, but the sharks wait until after the groupers spawn and then have a feeding frenzy. I wouldn't want to be in the water for that, but some folks pay big bucks to dive and watch the sharks feed on the spawned out grouper.

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of pictures since most of my time has been spent underwater and I don't have an underwater camera. Ben and Brian have some cool snorkeling video, though. I'll try to post one of those. I do have some pretty awesome sunset shots. Since some of the motus are pretty large, it looks like you're anchored in the middle of the ocean. The pictures don't really do any of the scenery justice.