Kona Water temperature's sitting at 75 or so.

Hi there, we've had a bit of a swell the last few days. It's down again right now. I went out this morning for a litte dive before running errands. Next week they are expecting a big swell off Oahu. If it's big enough, they may even hold the Eddie Aikau Invitational surf tournament, which is held only in HUGE surf. Here's a write up from the tournament a couple years back. By the time it reaches here it may or may not be large enough to affect our diving much.

We're tearing into the boat right now and replacing the fuel tanks. We've got to tear up the deck, yank out the old tank, order a new tank or tanks in and then rebuild the deck... how fun. It's slow right now so it's not a bad time to be doing this. When I picked up the boat a few years back it came with an aluminum tank that had it's share of corrosion, meant for lots of filter changes. We'd finally gotten to where everything was pretty clear and then the state went to 10% ethanol in gas. Ethanol is wreaking havoc with marine gas engines here as it's highly corrosive and has an affinity for water. That apparently is what has been causing a lot of the little irritating issues with the engine the last while.... so now we're going to try to go to plastic or stainless steel which are non-reactive to ethanol. I hopefully will have everything back together soon, in the meanwhile I've got a friend or two with charter boats who can handle my charters.

The underwater photo above is of a Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus). These worms usually are burrowed into living coral and have a trap door at the surface of the coral where their feathery gill/feeding structure (the spiral fronds in the picture) stick out. If they are spooked they can instantly withdraw their gill/feeding structure adn slam th door shut. They're tough to get a good picture of because you need to get close enough to get light on them without scaring them, and also at that close it's tough to get a real good focus or depth of field. I keep trying different speeds and methods, this is my best (luckiest) shot of one so far.

Later,

Steve