5 manta dives in 8 days, plus a few day charters and puttin' together the scuba office....

.... I slept in 'til 7 today. I decided to start trying to offer the manta dive on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to keep up with the schedule, but I'm sort of getting used to it. After the charters and the cleanup I usually get home from the manta dive about 11:30 to 11:45, which is waaay past my bedtime, and I can't sleep right away. At first getting up at 6 am to do it all over again was really causing me grief - very tired - but I'm starting to get a bit more used to it. We ended up doing an extra night charter to accommodate a group of existing customers and it worked out fine, but I don't know if I'll keep the MWF thing indefinitely or not... sort of depends on what happens this fall when I'm running the office somewhat regularly. For now, as long as I stay away from caffeine in the evening I seem to be able to crash early enough to get enough sleep for now after the night charters.

If the phone doesn't ring, I've got a couple days off. I basically kind of need the days off right now anyway, relax for a day or two at least. I've been 30 straight days on the boat or working on the walls at the office for several hours. I'll still spend a couple hours down there today, but it won't be a 6-15 hour day like a lot of the last month's been. I'm finishing up the slatwall today and then will start working on the trim tomorrow. I've got to take the chopsaw down to the shop tomorrow and start cutting molding that'll cover my stripe in the middle of the walls right now. I'll still have a stripe, it'll just likely not be white.

The video slideshow above is pretty cool in my opinion. One of our customers came over for a bit and carried around a Sealife digital camera and took shots of many of the things she saw. I found this posted on her blog listed as "fish food" on my links on the sidebar and thought it was real neat. Mel's given me permission to post it here. One thing I noticed, she's got a nice picture of an Imperial Shrimp that's not labeled... Theyr'e tough to get a shot of 'cause they generally dart off before you can get the shot. It's on the first cushion star.... it immediately stood out for me when I first watched the video - I've been trying, pretty much unsuccessfully, to get a decent shot of one for years. Anyway, I think her video give a real good idea of what you can potentially see on a dive trip to Kona. Thanks for letting me post this Mel!

Aloha,

Steve