Scuba diving on Kona night dives is really cool...

Kona is pretty well known for it's manta ray night dive, but scuba diving on night dives in general is very cool here. Lots of things come out of the reef at night, shrimp, lobsters, urchins, hunting eels... even squid, like this one I took a picture of last year. When I'm leading the manta dive, I try to make it a point of taking the "long way" back to the boat and look for cool critters - you never know what you might come across.

So I thought I'd put up a quick post about the surf we're expecting here. Big surf, in the 20 foot plus range, pounded the north shore of Oahu yesterday. They said to expect it to bump up to the 30-50... yes, 50 ... foot range in the next day or two. Fifty is huge, I don't think we've had that on Oahu in the years I've lived in Hawaii. In Kona we're often shaded by the other islands from north and northwest swells, and those 20-30 foot swells they get on the other islands can turn in to 6-12 here much of the time - that's still quite diveable - but it'll be interesting to see if this pans out. If it does then we'll probably be shut down for a couple of days here too. Usually we don't get significant cancellations due to swells in months outside of January and February, sometimes none in any given year.

If the surf comes up, I'll see if I can get some pictures.

Aloha,

Steve

No diving tomorrow for many, maybe most, dive companies in Kona... Ironman is happening...

One of these days I'm going to have to get downtown for all of the Ironman festivities. Before my wife Pat and I moved here we came out for a vacation and it happened to be Ironman week. It's fun... lots of good energy. I still am impressed with seeing Alii Drive lined with spectators, many with contestant listings and looking up numbers as people approach and then yelling encouragement... "way to go Mark" ... and such, using the racers names. It's a neat event. Since I've moved here though I tend to stay away or spend the day watching college football to avoid the crowds.

Yesterday, well I guess it was the day before yesterday now due to the late hour, I was heading off to a charter and realized if I had started into town just 10 minutes earlier I could have caught one event I haven't witnessed as of yet - the Kona underpants race. It's more of a parade than anything, there's no winner and they're not going very fast. It started several years ago when a couple of the racers were offended seeing other racers and others walking around town (grocery stores, restaurants, etc) in banana hammocks (Speedos, for those who are not familiar with the term) and decided to get a group of racers together to walk a portion of downtown Kailua in their tighty whiteys in protest. It's turned into a sizable event now, I think they had over 400 co-ed participants yesterday morning. It's become an event that raises money for local charities. I think they hold it the Thursday before the main event at 8am, at least that's when it was this year.

Not sure if I mentioned this, but my camera gave up the ghost a week or two ago. I'm now going through my old stuff and either finding pics I've missed, or altering (hopefully for the better) pics I've posted before for a little while 'til I figure out what I'm going to do about a camera.

Our local Costco just started printing posters up to 30X20 inches on a new large format inkjet printer they picked up, so I've been having some fun going through my photos and finding some I can blow up and hang on my walls in the new office/shop. I'm thinking I posted the original of this pic earlier. If I did, it had most of the original background in it... rocks, backscatter, some guy's fins, etc. I spent a little while (call it a couple hours at least) after the charter tonight in Photoshop cloning out all the extraneous stuff so I'd have a pic I wanted to hang on the wall (now I only wish every squid was in focus). I'm happy with the way it turned out for now, at least 'til I see it blown up.

I'm up late tonight... dove the manta night dive and I usually can't sleep afterward. I got involved with the squid pic and couldn't stop. It's 2:30 am and I probably should crash, although since they're basically shutting down the highway to the harbor tomorrow I have nowhere I have to be early on.

Later,

Steve

Here's Lookin' at ya....

I don't think I've posted this squid shot from last year before.

We were seeing squid again on the manta dive a couple of times the last few months... they're always fun. We did the manta night last night, no squid but it was a great time for all. The manta dive has been hopping still, maybe a bit more up and down the last few weeks, I'm only aware of one or two no-show nights since late February.

I've got tomorrow off, then comes another two week minimum stretch without days off. I'm trying to set my manta outings to strictly Monday or Wednesday or Friday from here on out, and then likely go out on whichever two of those days gets booked first. I get people asking why I don't run it every night... well, I work 7 day charters a week when it's busy, and with two night dives thrown in on top of it that means for an awful lot of shifts for the three of us to cover. Most of the dive operators doing it more than 2-3 times a week are the bigger companies with multiple boats and/or employees.... I'm not there just yet.

We've had quite the south swell for a while, but it appears it's going down for at least a while. With the swells came warmer waters... YAY!!! Bob had water temperature readings of 81 degrees on both of his dives last night... I can't belive the water's actually warmed up about 7-8 degrees since April, that's a big jump.

Aloha,

Steve

Working on a few things....

Hi there,
I'll be updating the template on the blog for a bit here so it may look a bit unusual compared to normal. In the end it should be close to what it was. Here's a shot of the squid we saw this last summer on the manta ray night dive.

We're busy running charters again, hopefully it'll keep that way for a while 'til the Christmas season kicks in. Yesterday the water was still at the 79 degrees we've been seeing for a couple of months now.

Interestingly enough, my 14 pound weight gain of vacation has turned into 3 pounds in just 4 days... must've been all the french fries, salt and fatty stuff I pigged out on in the last few days of the trip... the diving's probably helped, but I think it's more likely not eating the carbs that's doing the trick.

Later,

Steve

More squid..... Less blabber....

The last post was too long...

Aloha,

Steve

Another Hawaiian bigfin squid pic from last month....

I wish these critters were around all of the time, they aren't, so when we do see them it's a real treat.

Last week we had a customer who wanted to do a reef night dive. We were able to get another who wanted to do one and weren't working the next morning... so why not? I sat on board while Bob led the divers for a 70-80 minute or so long night dive. We've done a reef night dive a few different spots and Cathy did the last one at this spot. Cathy came up very excited from her dive here in June, and when Bob came up he could barely get his regulator out before saying "Wow Steve, this is a fantastic night dive". He said it was probably the best reef night dive he'd ever done in Hawaii. He said the reef was nothing but little red eyeballs looking back at you and he was going to have to look at his invertebrate book to figure out what all the different types of shrimp he saw were. My turn next! I want to see if this place is better than what I've done so far. We don't get a lot of call for reef night dives, although I wish we could get more, the trick is trying to get enough divers to make it worthwhile for us. We're slower now so it's something we can do with fewer people IF the schedule works.

Later,

Steve

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.... well, not really, but these squid sure remind me of tree ornaments....

I just returned from another manta ray night dive up off of the Kona airport. There were 4 to 5 mantas tonight, it was a good show for all on board. We haven't been seeing squid the last few times out, I'm glad I had the camera with me the night this group showed up... I still have more shots I'll post later.

Aloha,

Steve

Here's an underwater video of squid on the manta ray night dive in Kona Hawaii. It was taken with a Canon G9 camera...

Bigfin Squid in Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.

Hi there, here's a short video clip I took on the night I got the underwater photos of the squid I've posted earlier. They change color almost constantly. They seem quite curious about the goings on of the night dive. I took a bunch of pictures in a few minutes time on that dive, and a few of them turned out, so I've got a bunch of color variations on the picture's you'll see on the blog.

I wish we could find these all the time on the night dive, they seem to be showing up more often as time passes, but for now it's really a special event for us.

Aloha,

Steve

Welcome to the Kona Hawaii squid blog...

Ok, so it's not a squid blog... but I did get a bunch of photos on the manta ray night dive last night. I'll be able to keep showing squid from time to time 'til I get more regular stuff in.

These shots were taken with my Canon G9 in a Canon WP-DC21 waterproof case. I didn't use any external strobes or lenses, just the base kit. They were taken at night using some light from other divers along with a handheld LED light, primarily for focusing purposes as the onboard flash is pretty much responsible for the lighting showing in the photos.

Aloha,

Steve

p.s. I haven't shown my favorite squid shots yet.

Today's picture says a lot for how the day's diving was....

It was a very good day!!!! More later... Been busy for several days now and pulled a double today, it's after midnight and I have to get up at 6 for tomorrow's charter.

This critter is a Bigfin Squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana). It's the first one I've ever seen. They've been showing up on the manta dive from time to time, and this time I saw it and had a camera in hand... keep an eye on the blog for more on these critters.

Aloha,

Steve