Lots of great diving in Kona the last couple of weeks...

Aloha,

I've been quite busy since about the 18th doing charters, have a day in the shop today so I thought I'd catch up on diving conditions. The water temp has bumped up, we're seeing 79/80 on the dives right now. We've had a couple pretty big south swells swing through the last 3-4 weeks, they tend to stir up the south facing sites a bit so we tend to do north facing sites on those days.

Mantas mantas mantas. We've been going out two evenings a week this summer for the most part, were skunked 3 times in the last month or so.... bummer, but Friday night was really quite the show. There were 14 mantas at the light circle when I got my divers down, and then it started to get crowded. A total of 21 mantas showed up for the evening. It's almost overwhelming when we get that many mantas, but it was nice to see that many as it was kind of sporadic the previous 3 weeks. An additional highlight of that dive was on the roundabout tour back to the boat at the end when we came across a pretty good sized Bigfin Reef Squid (sorry no photo, but if you search the blog using the search function in the upper left I've got several squid photos that will show up).

Here's a local cerianthus anemone. In the aquarium trade we called them pacific long tentacle anomone. These guys are found down deep in the sand. I took a picture of this one at about 110' several years ago, I generally don't get down that deep often so we don't see them on tours all that often.

Later,

Steve

Blogging about Kona Hawaii Scuba Diving Blog....

Stupid title, but I just noticed I've never really put the word "blog" in a title in my blog and I get lousy position results when doing a google for "hawaii blog" and such... just thought I'd see if titles mean anything to search engines.

So this is a Cerianthus tube anemone. We don't see them all that often. I found this one about 120 feet out in the sand, and I've talked to a tech diver who said they're usually found at 150'+, which is beyond the standard recreational depth of 130' and shallower. We used to keep them in aquariums and they were fairly hardy, but they can take up a lot of space in the tank, clownfish generally won't go into them, and they are kind of nasty... I had a customer who said her's was actively hunting and eating her fish and I hadn't see that before so I went for a visit and saw it first hand. When a fish went near you could see the tentacles all move in the direction of the fish. There was no need to make contact, the tentacles would all sway towards any movement. Apparently they are fairly predatory for an anemone.

On my previous post I did not name the fish. It was an Oval Butterflyfish (Chaetondon lunalatus). These fish are one of Bob's favorites.

Later,

Steve