Solo 30-Mile Paddle Newport Beach to Catalina Island

Solo 30 Mile Catalina Crossing (Switchfoot On Fire)
This video was taken on 9/9/17 during the Women's 2017 US Outrigger Championship race. This race keeps growing in popularity every year and is starting to attract outrigger canoe clubs from all over the world. My wife Sherri was in this race, and my only goal was to beat her boat to the finish line with enough time to get the drone in the air and get some video of her canoe coming in. Even though I had a 3-hour head start her canoe still beat me to Avalon. To tell the truth, pretty much all of the women's canoes beat me to Avalon. It took about 8 hours to make it to Catalina. Everything changed when I got out there. At one point I looked back and saw the dolphins and turned back toward Newport to follow the dolphins. When I was 10 miles out, I stop to send Sherri my GPS accordance, and I thought I saw a whale spout about a 1/4 mile back toward Newport? Once again I turned the canoe around and started heading back to Newport telling myself you're going to regret this later as I turn back again. In the end, I did not regret any of the detours and was glad that I took my time and enjoyed the trip. The songs for this video were chosen before the trip was made and that was the reason for the tiki torch, it was a prop for the first song in the video. The second song was supposed to be for a second video that was going to be a video showing the women crossing the finish line. Since I wasn't able to shoot that video, I still used the song and keep the video rolling. You can see Sherri in the video on the dock waving as she is just coming in from her race. There is also some footage of the canoes they raced over on. This could not have been a better day for a channel crossing as you can see from the video. The first canoes passed me just after the first 15 miles of the race. The race was a total of 30 miles. This trip was a blessing from God!