Escaping the summer heat? Maybe Kona Hawaii is the place to be...

We've been real busy lately with dive charters, and oddly enough there's been someone from Texas on the boat almost every charter the last 3-4 weeks. I figure they must be coming here to get out of the heat. Let's face it, Kona's a wonderful place to be when the mercury's hitting the century mark at home. We've been seeing 83 degrees, plus or minus 2 degrees, and quite pleasant pretty much every day the last couple of months.

Summer's been fairly busy for us. We're starting to get into a routine with the shop now, we're open from 8am to 5pm. We're trying to get our inventory set up electronically from here on out, Pat's been sitting at the computer inputting bar codes and descriptions. She looked at me the other day and said "you owe me bigtime, do you realize you've got almost a thousand different items in the shop already?" I"m not sure if we're up to a thousand items, but it's well into the hundreds when you start figuring in sizes and colors of shirts/fins and all the assorted accessory items we're starting to carry.

Update on current water conditions. Summer's here! We've had some wonderfully flat days lately. The water's still 78 on my computer, but it's feeling warmer than it was a few weeks back to me. Lately I've dove the manta dives a few times (always a fun dive) and several dives with students, otherwise I've been mostly playing boat captain. I need to hire one more part time boat captain, that can also lead dives, to round out our scheduling.

Here's a Moorish Idol photo I took some while back. They're one of our more "popular" fish, but they're kind of hard to get photos of... I can't tell you how many "fish butt" photos of these guys I have. They have a knack for turning at the last moment and the camera delay of most point and shoot cameras is enough to allow them to turn and give you a different photo than you expected.

Time to give the boat a little touch up...

Well, after 3 years of dings and scrapes it's time to give the boat a light touch up on the interior paint. One fo my newer hires, Brian, is pretty handy so we've been redoing the electrical to make sure everything's working right and now he's been playing with fiberglass touching up the cosmetic end a bit filling in the tank dings. Should be ready for painting shortly. We're going to try to do it on our own rather than pay thousounds for the local boat guys to do it. For the exterior, I spent an hour or two of hand buffing and it looks a lot better. We'll see if that can last us another year or two before having it professionally done.

We've had pretty nice weather in Kona lately, can't say the same with Oahu and Kauai. I've been running into people who've seen a lot of rain on the other islands the last several days. Kona is blessed in that it sits in the weather shadow of the other islands to the northwest, and behind a volcano which shields it from weather approaching from the east. We still get our occasional foul weather days, but it's nowhere near as bad as what some other areas see.

In honor of cleaning up the boat, here's a cleaner shrimp. I really think these critters are neat. They live in coral heads and set up shop, fish will visit them and the shrimp will crawl all over the fish picking parasites and other unwanted critters off and make a meal of them.

Later,

Steve

Big surf, new computer, etc.....

So the surf has been HUGE the last few days. Here's a shot of the mouth of Honokohau Harbor yesterday. The whole area was washed out. It's on it's way down right now and we're hoping it clears up enough to do some intros tomorrow.... we'll see.

My computer has been giving me problems for quite some time, and started making bleeping USB connecting sounds (literally bleeps, not that I'm trying to sneak in a blog friendly cuss word) at me last week, then yesterday it completely died. Luckily I had purchased a computer for the shop, so today was spent in part getting it set up.

I wanted to get this photo on it to post for the blog. There's no photo editing program on the computer so I downloaded Picasa... I'll tell you right now it comes off as soon as I have time to get Photoshop on the computer, can't stand it already.

Been working in the shop the last few days trying to put it together. It's an embarrassingly messy disaster area right now... that should end in two days, I almost have all the fixtures nailed in and then I can get it organized.

The surf's coming down, but a storm's supposed to hit tomorrow and dump a lot of rain on us. Rain does not actually affect the diving in Kona because there's little soil near most of our dive sites to cause runoff issues, tomorrow's diving will be more dependant on whether wind and thunderstorms come along with the storm. Hopefully it'll just be a bit of rain and relatively calm seas.

Later,

Steve

Kona Hawaii Weather NOW... kinda yucky today...

On Wednesday they started putting out civil defense alerts for flash flooding for the island starting on Thursday evening, it finally started raining about an hour ago, call it 10:30 Friday morning. Kauai and Oahu had some good rains and wind damage yesterday, Maui started raining overnight, we'll see how it is here. This is what it looks like outside my house right now. I'm only 2 miles from the ocean and normally we can see the shoreline, the ocean and a whole lot of sky... now it's just gray space beyond our yard.

Click here for the current weather loop. Note: if you're looking at this on another day, it'll be current for then, not December 10th, 2010. Subtract 10 hours from the UTC time to get current Hawaii Standard Time.

I've cancelled tonight's charter. Frankly, it'll be very wet at the very least, if thunderstorms come up it'll be dangerous. Everyone's better off waiting a day or two if they can.

So today I'm running errands. I just ordered essentially a thousand bucks worth of pegboard accessories for the shop. It's not cheap setting up a retail store. I'll be unpacking boxes all day tomorrow and maybe into Sunday, then I gotta figure out where to put it and wait for the next shipments to come in.

Christmas season is almost fully booked, a week ago I had a couple charters booked, now I've got charters every day from the 17th through the third, and a good portion of them are already full... lots of phone calls the last week. Hopefully this is our only storm coming through the next few weeks. From the doppler, it's looking to be the longest stretch of rain (meaning 12+ hours) we've had in Kona in about two years. We don't typically get all day rains.

It's been gorgeous here for a couple of weeks.
Here's a shot of a sunset 3-4 evenings ago... it's getting to be that season where the sunsets are particularly gorgeous at our house. I suspect by tomorrow night we'll be seeing sunsets again.

Later,

Steve

Gorgeous morning in Kona Hawaii today...

I pulled over to take a quick shot coming into work this morning. We've had a bit of a breeze the last 2 or 3 days that's blown out all of the vog. I was hoping for a great sunset, but we've got a bit of a front coming in.

We're into the heart of the slow scuba season right now. From what I've seen, lots of the boats aren't running full, if they're running at all. I've got a bit of a lull myself, looks like no charters through the weekend unless I get a phone call. I go with just two divers, I may be one of the few that does, so it doesn't take much to get my boat out for dives. The booking inquiries are starting to pick up for March and May... that's a positive thing... the January/February slow period seems to happen every year for me.

We had a manta charter the other night. Numbers have been a bit on the low side, there were two that night, and we've had to go to the Sheraton site to find mantas. Everyone's hoping the plankton picks up at Garden Eel Cove soon so the mantas come back there. It comes and goes, that the way it is, but when it's thick, the site is thick with mantas.

I'm down at the shop again today. I'll probably be spending quite a few days this upcoming month there. It's looking pretty good. I've got internet at the office, so I've been spending some of my time reworking my Kona scuba diving website a bit in hopes of regaining some search engine karma after switching website URL names in November. That's coming along now too, starting to get e-mails and phone calls generated from the site again after a bit of a slow time.

Later,

Steve

Another day... another frogfish....

Here's a shot of the same frogfish from the other day that I took this morning. Today it was gorgeous in Kona... bright and sunny, no clouds over the ocean and few on the mountains. We had some customers on board today that were great on air... 84 minutes the first dive and 72 on the second. They'll be on the next several days, it'll be curious to see if their bottom time improves even more. We had a ripping current on our first dive, so we turned it into a one way dive and I followed their bubbles to pick them up down the coastline so they didn't have to battle the current the whole dive... those dives are always fun as you can cover quite a bit of ground and see some spots we generally don't see when we're moored the whole dive.

Current water temperatures are still a quite comfortable 80-ish. This is a great time to be diving in Kona.

I'm making slow but steady progress on the office between charters. Been busy varnishing bamboo sheeting the last couple days among other things. It's coming together.

Just thought I'd make a quick post.

Later,

Steve

Time for a Hawaii underwater nudie photo...

Here's a shot of a Gold Lace Nudibranch (Halgerda terramtuentis). Looking up the scientific name, I just learned something new... this nudibranch is apparently only known from the Hawaiian Islands... cool, another piece of trivia. I was down doing a "Captain's dive" a week or two ago and saw this one under an arch.

The surf is really up right now. We've had a big south swell for several days now, and it seems to have peaked (hopefully) the last 2 days. We've got turquoise looking water all along the coast right now... people think it's pretty, but for divers it kind of sucks... it basically is light reflecting off all of the sand in the water, not clear water showing off it's beauty. I didn't go out today, but I had a buddy today that went out and said he had to do both dives at Kealakekua Bay and the viz was horrible - considering the sand is nearly 90 feet down at that spot, for it to be kicked up enough to make for horrible viz says something. Tomorrow's a big marathon/triathlon event in Kona, between that and the surf we're taking the day off. I'm hoping for better conditions come Monday... the weather report says the surf's coming down.

So, sort of big news for me - I signed a lease yesterday. I've been operating out of my garage and pickup truck for years, now I'll have an "office" in town where I can hang my T-shirts and store my gear. It's near enough to the harbor that it'll be quite handy. I've been wanting to have a spot to meet customers ahead of time to try gear on and sign papers to maybe speed up our morning pre-dive rituals. It's not a big spot, but big enough for my needs at this point. I'll have more information as time goes on... today Pat and I were looking at paint chips, it's currently gloss white, I'm looking to spice it up a hair if I can clear it with the landlord.

That's it for now.

Aloha!

Steve

Another day of gorgeous weather in Kona today....

Yesterday's rains were predicted to continue on into today originally. We woke up to gorgeous blue skies once the sun came up. It was completely flat and the boat was full of good divers who were in no hurry (we're getting back to the harbor around 4:30 or later when we do the longer trips), so we decided to make a day of it and cover some ground again heading north to check out the area adjacent to the dive site we hit the other day with the same group. Cathy dove with the group, checking out a veritable swiss cheese reef of swim throughs. We've never actually dove that specific area before, although Bob's dove it as part of a one way dive, I'd like to dive it the next time we get up that way. It's quite different from the adjacent parcel of reef we dove the other day. Hopefully we can get up there again a couple times this year.

Tomorrow was originally a day off, but now it's a charter. I may have a day off later this month, still plenty of openings in April though.

The fish above is a "Rockmover Wrasse", which is the adult version of a "Dragon Wrasse" (Novaculichthys taeniourus). They look quite a bit different from the juveniles, and have slightly different habits. As adults, they've earned the name "rockmover" because they spend their entire days picking up rocks and corals and moving them around. They can pick up a pretty good sized chunk of coral, even chunks roughly the same size as they are. They're searching for small urchins and other goodies that they can eat.

Later,

Steve

We had a few bright sunny days... and I'm due for a haircut....

We had some really bright sunny days before today (clouds everywhere and rain in the hills today). There was a weather system that brought in some fairly strong north winds that blew all the clouds and the vog out. This shot was taken at about 4:30 in the afternoon - that's Hualalai in the background, and you rarely ever see the top of it in the afternoon, it's usually covered by clouds over the course of the day.

Despite the winds, the diving's been good. The winds really only affected the top couple feet of water, and since we didn't have a swell going on Thursday, while it looked awful on the surface (lotsa whitecaps) the viz was really great underneath. Yesterday and today there was a bit of a swell along with the winds, but the excellent underwater viz has still been holding up.

Water temperature? Brrrrrr. Our customers have been doing fine, but those of us who are used to diving here are freeeeeezing. I've taken to wearing a 3 mil shorty underneath my full suit to take the edge off. Cathy was talking with one of her fishermen friends this morning and he was saying he hadn't seen the water this cold since about '94. Things should start edging up over the next month or two, but we're thinking fondly of summer/fall water right now.

later,

Steve

It's a banana buffet....

It's a bright sunny day today in Kona an the day geckos are out in force looking for fruit. We've had a bunch of bananas ripening and there were geckos crawling all over them.

Later,

Steve

We're coming into the best time of the year to dive in Kona and Hawaii...

...although you really couldn't tell it today from above the water, it was great below. Today's charter was with a fun family that was mostly certified for scuba diving, with a younger one who was doing an intro. We went to the first site and after everyone was down I decided I ought to put on some sunscreen - that did it - it wasn't minutes before we were covered with a big dark cloud that created it's own weather and wouldn't leave. This was the first charter in maybe a couple of years I've been rained on during both dives. Luckily, we've got more shade, in this case umbrella, than most of the 6 packs (and some of the larger boats) so it was relatively dry up topside despite the downpour, just cooler and darker than normal.

Our water is warming up, today it might have been warmer in the water than topside... water temp at 79 on Bob's conservative computer, and maybe that above when it wasn't raining. Late summer is when the water gets warmer and generally calmer, it's pretty nice by most standards.

Anyway, we moved to the second site which was a little calmer and the rain held off 'til the divers went down. I got to enjoy the rain on the ocean... you'd almost need to see a video of it (I didn't take the camera today), but the ocean often looks quite interesting when it's getting poured on.

Here's an underwater photo I took of a juvenile Dragon Moray (Enchelycore pardalis) a couple of months back. This was taken on the same dive I took the pic of the adult Dragon Moray I posted earlier (take a look through the April/May/June archives or click on "moray eel" directly below, I'm not sure which month I posted it)... we see them rarely enough, it's really something when you see two on the same dive.

Later,

Steve

It's a beautiful day in Kona Hawaii

Aloha,

This is a Scrambled Egg Nudibranch I took a picture of the other day. They're about our most commonly seen nudibranchs off Kona.

I forgot to mention the water temp on the last dive... surprisingly enough the big swell we had didn't seem to drop the temp any. Bob and I were both still seeing 79 degrees on our computers.

Today I'm finishing up cleaning up our vacation rental as we have renters coming in tonight. The rental and the immediate yard in front of it were spared any of the flood damage. We've finsihed cleaning the mud out of the garage and have sandbagged around the back end of the house to hopefully keep it getting wet again if we have another huge rain. We talked with someone from the county and they told us to hang tight before re-doing the yard as a coffee farm above us is where the waterflow problem is and they'll havve to fix their property to keep ours from getting nailed on huge rains. Hopefully "huge" means huge, we've seen 3 rains in the last two weeks that flooded us out, but all three were more rain in less time than we've had in years.... anywhere from 3.5 inches to 7.5 inches in a couple of hours each storm. That's not normal for our area. For now the weather is looking great and hopefully the ground will dry out a bit so it can hold water again.

The Hawaii weather report is.... WET

Friday evening on the news, they announced a flash flood warning for the entire state through late Tuesday night. We haven't had that much "weather" in Kona, but it poured on Sunday. Apparently they had real rain troubles on Oahu. It's gorgeous today so far, but I won't be surprised if we see a few more downpours later today or tomorrow.

I've been working on the boat getting it ready for charter. I just have to finish the main cabin door and hang it, along with a few other little things. Tomorrow we start chartering again. So far I have charters lined up for Tuesday, Wednesday evening, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. November in the past has typically been my slowest month, so it's not looking too bad from here on.

Here's a couple of shots of the cockpit of the boat. That's me, dirty shirt and all (much to my wife's horror), sitting on the transom and coming out of the cuddy cabin.It's a bit difficult to get a handle on the size of the boat. It's not a huge boat by any means, but I'm at about 245 lbs (I gotta work on that) and take up a fair amount of space and there's plenty of room for several more like me, so it's not exactly a canoe either. I'll post a photo of the front area some other time.

Aloha,

Steve

Quick update....11:20am...no unusual weather in Kona yet.

In fact, the water was nearly mirrorpond flat this morning. We went to the harbor and virtually nobody was out. The town is very quiet, all schools on the island are closed, as are beach parks and beach accesses. They did close some roads down on the southeast side. That's all for now.

Steve

Gorgeous hurricane weather today....

Here's a couple of views from up the hill this afternoon. It's quite nice today. Everyone's been keeping an eye on what was at one time Hurricane Cosme. I think it's currently classified as a tropical depression and is located well south of the island.

We occasionally get inquiries about hurricanes, more specifically we get inquiries about avoiding "hurricane season"... while technically we do have a hurricane season here, they usually have little to no effect on Kona itself. Hurricanes in our part of the world tend to develop in the eastern Pacific, off Mexico or Central America and then head west in our direction. They tend to peter out for the most part by the time they get here as they swing over cooler water as they approach us. Oftentimes when they do reach here they swing south or north around the Big Island... something to do with a 13,000 foot high wall (Mauna Loa)redirects them a bit usually. The east side of the island does seem to get plenty of rain, wind and surf, but Kona tends to sit in the shadow of the mountain and gets very little activity. I've only seen rain or wind from a named storm maybe once in the 8+ seasons I've been here. Today it's sunny, calm and flat out on the water.

So something's gone awry with my little Olympus sp-350 camera. It started a couple outings ago and is definitely a problem now. The flash is only operating intermittantly. I noticed it wasn't working as I blew a bunch of easy shots, tried looking at it and taking a shot and nothing happened, readjusted it, took a few more dark photos, readjusted it again and pointed it towards myself to see if it's working - it did, but only for this shot. It still isn't working properly otherwise. Pat liked the shot, especially since it makes me look, in her judgement, about 70 pounds heavier than I actually am.


Aloha,

Steve

Don't count your chickens before they're hatched....

In the spirit of that, I'm sitting on some news. I've been waiting on something and I'll probably know the outcome one way or the other in a few days, so next time I post I may be happy, disappointed, or somewherre in between (if I'm still waiting to find out the outcome).

It's been cool and wet up mauka today, with rain most of the day... a rarity here in Kona at our elevation. I talked with Bob earlier today, he was out with another company, said it was pretty nice on the water as long as they stayed out of the south facing spots. We've had a pretty good south swell the last couple of days, apparently yesterday was particularly nasty and the best diving was up in the Sand Chute and Garden Eel Cove area off the Kona airport where we do our night dive.

It'll be curious to see if the swells bring our water temps up. It's about the time of year the temperatures start to bump back up slowly.

The picture above is of a Pebble Collector Urchin. The common form is dark blue and looks much like an imperial crown, this one (two actually, there's one in the background) is a white one, which is much less commonly found here. If you do happen to see them, take a close look at the white portions - the white is tons of little white tube feet that move rapidly... almost mesmerizing.

Later,

Steve

Cool and wet up mauka today...

I spent today pretty much around the house. It's cool (71 degrees at 4 PM today) and damp up at the house, I'm sure it's warmer down at the coast.. it was yesterday and the weather was much the same.

I've been busy working the other job the last little bit. I do have a couple of charters this week, but it's still rather slow. I already have 15-16 charters tentatively set up for next month, and most of the booking inquiries won't even start 'til the month begins, so I suspect I'll probably be working through the summer.... 7 days a week is the goal and then the airport job can likely disappear, but it's nice having it during the slow months.

We re-carpeted the vacation rental this week and are just finishing touching up the paint, after the next couple of guests we have a few days off to re-upholster the couch and love seat and then I'll post a couple of new pics of the place (there's a link on the right side that goes to the older photos). We were looking at the booking schedules and realized we basically only have 2-3 open weeks between now and the middle of next March in the rental - wow, I can remember when we first started renting it out and we were lucky to get a week every month or two.

I clicked another shot of a gecko hanging out in the bananas.

Aloha,

Steve