The most wonderful June day, a strip of sea sparkled under a warm sun.

The sea was painted, pallet perfect, in pale blues just as the 'perfect sky upon a painted ocean' phrase fell out of some poet's mind in the dim distant past. Flocks of birds worked around schools of fish leaving smudges of ripples the size of tennis courts. Terns, fluttering shearwaters, diving petrels, gannets, red billed gulls scared a woosh of spray as fish evaded aerial and submarine attack. There was no wind, a little earlier in the morning 10 knots frosted the sea, but by mid day there was no detectable breeze and barely a cloud left.

Despite decades of environmental media inspired environmental gloom talk, 3 June defied my usually dismal human intuition and replaced it with the joy of life. I am not an optimist, don't subscribe to the touchy feely 'if it's meant to happen it will happen' liberal cop out dance. Consequently I am positively pessimistic. Whenever I'm confronted, I look at the worst possible scenario and work my way from that to achieve a solution. Usually there is a fair bit of worry and stress involved before I settle on whether acceptance or change is necessary under whatever circumstances prevail. I describe this process as being involved with my life rather than being an audience in someone else's. I like real stuff in my life. I imagine that's why I spend so much time seeking out the 'June 3's' constantly.

I imagine I have the same addiction to the blast that June 3's give me is as a gambler sitting in some smoke infested booze bar plonking dollars into a slot hoping for a payoff of more dollars to plonk in the slot. I wonder whether it's the searching or the jackpot that is most important. I Can't have one without the other, that's for real. I go sailing or make some other adventure where I am more likely to receive a wondrous jackpot, a 'June 3', where life pours from the sky, jingles up from the throats of the birds and sparkles like the sun on the sea. At these times life is without future or past. Life is powerfully presented by every living thing surrounding me. What a blast it is to so merge with the world. Even after years of sailing here in the Bay and all the times I have experienced other 'June 3's' I have never become immune to their absolutely overwhelming niceness or the necessity to take every opportunity to find them.

While this 'June 3' is going on, apart from a few small fishing vessels around the close reefs, the odd launch heading to or back from Motiti or Mayor and one or two commercial fishing vessels hovering about while a spotter plane tries to find them a catch, there is nobody apart from me and my two German visitors, out here. I imagine that the bulk of Tauranga's people, over 100,000 of them, have found something better to do somewhere far more exceptional than sharing this particular June 3. I am in a bit of a panic now. What is it that occupies the minds and bodies of these 1000,000 people. What is so amazing and excellent for them that such a magnificent 'June 3' can be totally ignored. Where are they??? Hey what's going on!!!!?? Why am I not being told!!!

Huh, no worries, any fleeting suspicion, that I may be missing something, dissipated as an Indian Ocean Albatross swooped closer and closer until it was just metres away from Gemini Galaxsea. This bird is thousands of miles from its home. Imagine this beautiful solitary animal riding the air currents above a living ocean for weeks and weeks at a time, I imagine that every single waking moment for that bird would be a 'june 3'. I don't know if the grass is greener back in the city. Only three of us, four if you count the albatross, shared this most perfect day, this 'June 3' out there, a few miles off the coast in a perfect setting but anyhow, despite whatever it was that held everyone else's attention back on the shore, this June 3 2009. Yes, this perfect 'June 3' has happened whether it was meant to or not.