September, October and November can have some of the best scuba diving conditions...

...Long time no blog...

We're entering that time of year again which can be the best time to dive in Hawaii and Kona. The water's warming up nicely, it's roughly 80 right now, and will probably go up another degree or two. Add the water conditions to the fact that the tourist season slows down in the fall, and you've got potentially ideal diving.

I'd been really busy for much of August, now I've got a slow spell schedule-wise. I still have a bit more lined up this month than I did on the second day of last month, so it may be fairly busy yet.

We had a full boat for the manta dive a couple of nights back. There were a couple of manta rays at the manta dive. We had them right under the boat the moment our divers hit the water. When this happens, we still send our divers over to the dive site that all the operators share as that will get everyone an opportunity to have a show. Most all the dive operators do that, on occasions you'll get a new company or a private boat that hits the site and doesn't send their divers to the area everyone goes to and splits the manta action, that can be annoying for everyone but it hasn't happened in quite a while.

Yesterday we did a three tank dive day. I run a three tank local dive day for $149 per person where we stay pretty much within our regular dive area so we don't have to hit passengers up for what we'd need to do for a long range charter. There are plenty of great dive sites, without having to make an hour or two long boat run, so we don't have a ton of passengers (we'll go with two) or charge a great deal to do a three tank day. We had two divers over from Oahu on the boat. Both were very good divers, so the average dive time for the three dives was in the 90 minute + range. Four and a half hours underwater is a lot of bottom time in a day for most people, but they seemed pretty darned happy with the diving here in Kona. They were used to diving Oahu and thought the viz and diving here was fabulous... it was kinda average viz for here yesterday in reality. The diving does vary from island to island, if you haven't dove Kona but have on the others, give Kona a try, you just may be impressed as we have lots of areas with reef that is better than elsewhere in the islands.

Here's a photo of a red-spotted nudibranch. We seem to see these guys sort of "seasonally". I can't pick the season, but it just seems that at times we see them frequently, then they disappear alltogether for quite a while.

Later,

Steve