Hold the Mayo....

I didn't post to my blog in May at all. The first half of the month I was so busy I didn't have time, the second half of the month was so slow I didn't have anything to say. That's how it goes sometimes in this business, especially in the "slower" months when things aren't necessarily steady.

We're coming into our "busy" season quite soon. Over the years I've pretty much figured things start picking up for the summer after the 2nd weekend of June. Somewhere I heard that diving's target market is the 35-55 year old crowd. A good share of people in that age group are dealing with kids when they plan their trips, so it makes sense that the summer months and our holiday periods see an uptick in traffic.

I haven't presonally been in the water in 2 weeks so I won't comment on water temps, that'll change quite soon though as my charters start up again in two days. The manta riy night dive has been hopping for about 6 weeks or so, seems to have slowed down the last couple of nights as plankton has been kind of low for some reason, and that dive is dependant on plankton for the most part. You never know from one day to the next if the plankton'll show up at times.

Here's a shot of an undulated moray eel that apparently got into a pretty good scrap with another eel.... quite injured, don't know if it survived or not.

A belated.... Happy New Year!!!!!

Aloha,

I've been real busy this holiday season and put the blog on the back burner for a while. We're now back to the typical slow January so I've got some time to catch up on a few things.

So... diving's been really good up 'til the last week and a half or so. We had one or two gnarly days last week, then another couple bad days (real bad on Wednesday) that made for cancellations this week. Luckily, in Kona once the surf drops the viz can be back to pretty mcuh normal in a day at many of our dive sites. We're diving again tomorrow morning and in the evening we're going out for the manta dive, then it's a couple days off because I've got nothing booked, and then we'll see what early next week brings. According to Magicseaweed.com it looks like the biggest swell we've seen yet this winter hits on Monday. Hopefully it'll be a bit smaller than it currently looks to be once it gets here.

Now that we're coming into a slower time, I'm gonna get serious about getting the shop together so it's more than an office and storage spot for gear. We've been bringing in some product and extra fixtures and I'll be spending my "days off" from charters putting it all together. The goal is to get it all together, hire additional crew and get it open in the next 3 weeks or so.... lots of work to do! I'll have plenty of updates once we get open, odds are I'll be in the shop twiddling my thumbs a couple days a week so I'll have some computer time available.

Here's another shot by customer Jim from last month. I've been too busy to carry a camera on most of our dives so I've got nothing of my own for now, next week I'll make it a point to get a dive or two in with the camera. This is a nice small white phase Stout Moray. This eel comes in both a white/light phase and a darker (brown with speckles) phase. I consider the darker phase to be the more common one, but that's just my speculation as I seem to run into more of them.

Later,

Steve

Another nice day in Kona...

It's another nice non-diving day for me today. I'm at the shop today, I'll be out on the water most of the next several days it looks like. Pretty busy 'til the 4th or so.

Here's a small Tiger Moray. It was out crawling about the other morning. We usually see parts of this eel through holes, don't see the head as often. This is one of our eels that people sometimes mistake for a seasnake, it doesn't have much of a dorsal fin to look at.

Later,

Steve

So every now and then, I kinda like a corny joke...

We had a customer on the boat telling a couple jokes... here's one I can repeat...

What do they charge for piercings at the Pirate tatoo parlor?

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OK, this one is better heard than read...
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A buck an ear.

I got a kick out of that one.

I'm down at the shop today, have charters tomorrow and Monday evening then a few days off if the phone doesn't ring in the meanwhile. The last half of the month looks pretty busy.

Here's a shot of a small whitemouth moray eel. These guys are our most common eel, sometimes we make it through an entire dive without seeing any, but that seems to be the minority of the time... Hawaii has lots of eels.

This is another pic that I photoshopped out the blue. I should write down the steps when I do that, this pic turned out pretty accurate for color.

Later,

Steve

Hey, let's talk about seasickness... cures or remedies anyone???

I don't remember ever writing a post about seasickness yet. It's one of those things we see from time to time on the boat, not as often as you'd think, but it does happen.

I'll start off by saying... I'm not a Doctor! Take anything I say as being anecdotal speculation.

Now that that's over, let me tell you about myself. I used to get sick bigtime when I first started diving. I just put up with it. One day I had chocolate donettes before the dive... I lost it, tasted more like a milkshake than bile. I ate chocolate donettes before every dive boat outing from then on 'til I got turned on to Bonine. Some friends recommended Bonine and it worked for me, stuck with it for quite a while.

When I moved over here I worked in a now defuct dive shop down on Alii Drive and the manager was recommending taking 1 Bonine tablet in the evening, then one again in the morning about two hours before the charter. When I moved over to another dive shop to start working on a boat, they had the exact same recommendation. Pretty much every dive boat I've worked on had the exact same recommendation. It works pretty darned well for most people. I was on Bonine for the first couple weeks I worked on the boat, then we had some glassy flat days and I tried it without it and found I'm pretty much over the seasickness thing, on small boats anyway.

On every boat I've worked on over the years, we've seen our share of people feeling ill. Typically, we'll see people who say nothing works for them, they've tried everything, then we ask if they've tried Bonine or less-drowsy Dramamine (same active ingredient - meclizine hydrochloride) taking one pill in the evening and one pill in the morning. A lot of people are resistant to even trying it, but those that do generally feel pretty good the next day. A lot of people say it won't work because they've tried any number of things, usually with the active ingredient dipenhydramine hydrochloride, and can't stand the side effects. Well, dipenhydramin Hcl is used not only in sea sickness meds, but in Sominex, Nytol, Benedryl and other things not related to motion sickness... no wonder they're getting tired. It's primarily sold as an anti-histamine.

Anyway, from anecdotal observation, the meclizine hydrochloride pills, taken 1 the night before and 1 the morning of (so it's in your system) seems to work wonders for most people. I have seen it fail with about a half dozen people over the course of the last 11 years, for them it's time to visit the doctor and get a prescription for the patch and hope it works (nothing's fail proof, everyone's body's different).

Anyway, I managed to get past my sea sickness, except when I'm helping out on bigger boats or taking in diesel fumes on boats with older diesel engines. I'm not sure what it is about size, possibly a change in motion I'm not acclimated to, but I have a rough time of it on the big catamarans. I helped out with a now gone dive company that had a double decker catamaran a few years ago for a bit, and the second deck of that boat was really tough on me. My suspicion is that different people are set off by different motions. I talked with a Captain that worked multiple boats a few years back and he said his worst boat for people losing it was the biggest boat he drove, didn't think it was the boat so much as having that many people on board, someone's gonna get ill and then the sympathetic puking starts happening. He said he eventually broke down and brought a paint spatula to work with him during the winter months when working that boat - not sure if he was kidding or not.

Nowadays, about the only time I feel off is when eaten nothing before the charter. A little food goes a long way to fix that. I'd probably discourage a big meal, or loadiing up on bacon and grapefruit right before the dive too.

The underwater photo above is of a Yellow Margin Moray down at a coral head in the sand. When you find a nice coral head out in the sand, it can be an oasis of life. This one had bicolor anthias, cleaner shrimp, banded coral shrimp and more on this visit.

Later,

Steve

Dwarf Moray Eel....

Here's a little Dwarf Moray Eel (Gymnothorax melatremus) I spotted today peering out of a crack at Turtle Pinnacle on our second dive of the day. Turtle Pinnacle has become a bit less reliable as a turtle cleaning station as of late, but it's still a very good dive. We had a pretty big swell today and the viz was down for the second dive, but we were still able to find several eels, a divided flatworm, a rather uncooperative octopus that took off right after being spotted, a Flame angel, Great Barracuda and a school of Opelu, several pipefish and other critters. We had dolphins swim past us underwater briefly as we were going to our safety stop. Bob was Captain during that dive and said they'd been around our bubbles a few times during the dive....

... and that wasn't the good dive... the first dive was at a different spot where they (Bob and the gang) came up talking about seeing Tinker's butterflys, Flame angels, a Reticulated butterfly, a male Psychedilic wrasse with his harem of females, a manta or two (2 separate sightings, not sure if it was the same one) and a bunch of other goodies.

We've had signifcant north, south and west swells that have made things quite sloppy the last couple days, but it's settling down. Looking at www.magicseaweed.com it appears as if it's getting nothing but better throughout the week. Lots of diving ahead for us the next 10 days or so, I'm looking forward to better conditions.

Later,

Steve

Still busy.... Congratulations newlyweds!!!!

Odd title, but we've had newlywed couples on the last couple of days... must be a lot of late summer weddings.

We've had a pretty good south swell for it seems like forever, but we've been able to tuck in around corners and the viz where the swells aren't pounding has been fantastic. About a week and a half ago it was real heavy and we spent several days that we didn't have repeat customers up at Garden Eel Cove off the aiport... had viz in the 200' range - wow!

It's been pretty muggy the last two weeks, we've broke down and turned on the AC in our bedroom at night, we rarely do that for that long as the electrical rate here is outlandish.

Here's a shot of a Tiger Moray (Scuticaria tigrina). We don't see these fish's heads all that often, see their body through the coral heads from time to time.

Heading to bed... got morning and afternoon/evening charters tomorrow, so I'll be working from 8am to about 11pm or so.

Later,

Steve

Whale shark today!!!!!

We had a light load on board today, did dives at Black Hole and Sand Chute. "Black Hole" sounds more exciting than it actually is, but it's an all right dive. Sand Chute can be pretty good, especially when big things are swimming by. Today the bay off the Kona airport, where Sand Chute happens to be, was loaded with dolphins. Our divers did manage to get a brief glimpse of them underwater in the distance, but it was very brief.

On the way back we were rounding Keahole point and I noticed something on the surface. I thought it was a manta ray for a moment... then saw the spots....WHALESHARK!!! I hit the brakes and we ended up right next to it. It swam about 18 inches off our port side. Little guy, maybe about 12 feet long or so. Smallest one I've seen here. We're scrambling to get snorkels on masks and such and it made one more pass right next to the boat and was gone. We spent 20 minutes or so looking for it... bummer, it didn't stick around. This was still the highlight of the day, it's always a treat to see them, even if it's from the surface.

Here's a nice Yellow Margin Moray shot.

Steve

Sloppy, choppy water today between a big south swell and the wind... but the diving was great!

Today we had a couple of intro divers on board. Neither of our intros had ever scuba dived before so we went in search of calm water with good viz. We had to go up to the airport, north of Keahole point to find very good water for intros. Several spots between town and there were pretty OK, it's just that with intros we have to do skills on the mooring line and it's tricky to do them with new divers while they're holding on a line tied to a bouncy boat. The intro divers had a great time. Highlights of the day were mating octopus and a nice juvenile frogfish and lots more.

I haven't been taking a lot of photos lately, busy with students or larger numbers of customers, also was out for a while with a back/rib problem that has resolved itself. This photo above was one of an eel on a late afternoon dive spring of last year. Tonight I decided "what the heck" and ordered a copy of this photo from www.jumbogiant.com. This is a company I heard about several years ago, they do enlargements at a very reasonable price. The copy on this post is about 56K in size, the one I uploaded to them (took several minutes) was about 5.5 megabites in size. I ordered a 24"X36" photo luster print using "best crop". I figured I'd challenge them a bit with this photo, see where they crop it, as well as the fact that there's a bunch of white to deal with, to see how they do. The guys in town that do prints would charge pretty good money to do a giclee print of that size... Jumbo Giant charges $19.95 plus about $9 in shipping, about a quarter of what the photo enlargement shop I visited last week charges locally... so I thought it would be worth a shot. I'll let you know how it turns out, and how fast it gets here (just ordered it 20 minutes or so ago).

Been real busy lately.. I had 6-7 days off in early May but the month filled up after that, I have another 6-7 day stretch next week with nothing, but the phone's been ringing again and I've got 1-2 charters a day 'til July 3rd except for that little stretch. It'll probably fill in too though,if it does that'd mean only 1 day off this month.

Kona Water Temperature News: I've been whining about how cold the water was this year... well, about the first week of May things started warming up and haven't stopped... we're up about 7 degrees the last 5 weeks. The water is now sitting at a pleasant 79 degrees, touching 80/81 on our computers at times. YAHOO!!!!

Do you twitter? I've been playing around with it the last month or so. I picked up a new phone that takes OK pictures and has internet, so I can send them to twitter from the boat. In theory I could answer mail from the boat, but that involves figuring out how to set up my e-mail accounts on the phone... too much thinking for me right now. Anyway, I manage to update conditions several days a week via the phone on twitter, if you are interested, you can find me at http://twitter.com/wannadivesteve

Aloha for now,

Steve

Just a picture...

Aloha!

So what's this? Some kind of sea snake? Nope...

While technically there are a species or two of sea snakes that have Hawaii included in it's/their range, sightings are very very rare. We'll occasionally get snorkelers saying they saw some kind of sea snake working it's way through the coral. My suspicion is that this is the prime suspect.... what is pictured above is the body of either a Tiger Snake Moray (Scuticaria tigrina) or a Large Spotted Snake Moray (Uropterygius polyspilus), the latter of which I didn't even know existed 'til I opened the book 3 minutes ago to look up the scientific name of what I've always known of as a "Tiger Moray". I think you have to be a bit more of a science guy than I am to readily tell them apart unless you've got a really good shot of their nostrils (I'll have to take a look at my original shots to see if the nostrils above the eyes come in clear enough to differentiate between the two species).

Anyways, it's not totally uncommon to see a view similar to the above of these or other similar species of eels - body only, winding around through coral. The bodies are very tubular, as opposed to the regular morays which have tall dorsal fins, and remind people of snakes. If you are diving you can usually take a bit of a look around the coral head you see the body in and find it's head coming out somewhere. If you've got a camera - be ready, as the head will usually end up in another opening of the coral within seconds. I managed two head shots of this one before it disappeared again.

Aloha!

Steve

Ooooohhhh... it's flat out there.... very nice diving, very good viz....

Hopefully this'll keep up for a while.

The water's really cold right now, call it 71/72 or so... brrrrrrrr. That's as cold as it's been since I've moved here, I can only recall it being that cold in January/February of '00. It never really warmed up as much last fall as it usually does, so I guess the cold had a head start.

I'm excited.... I found my first baby frogfish of the new year for me. Sorry, no pics. I worked on my website a couple of days back and used the memory card from the camera to transfer pictures between my main computer to the old computer that has a copy of frontpage 2000 on it, and forgot to put the card back in the camera. I just knew I'd find something that would excite me... anytime I don't carry the camera that seems to happen. The frogfish was small, about the size of a finger nail. I'm hoping it sticks to the same general spot so we can track it as it grows. It's kind of in a high traffic spot right now, but if it moves maybe two feet in the proper direction it'll be in a good spot for viewing without getting knocked around by careless diver's fins. Last spring we saw more juvenile frogfish than we have in years, I'm hoping it's a trend that continues.... now we just need to start seeing more lionfish!

Here's another Yellow Margin Moray. It's probably our second most commonly seen moray, and probably our biggest that we see on a regular basis.

Later,

Steve

I done did it!

Howdy!
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out microsoft frontpage and trying to figure out how to build a website back when I first set up my business.... quite frustrating at times.... and once I finally got a page up I did very little to the index page over the years. Well, it was due for a refresh and today I sat at the computer and went to work.

I never was able to come up with a transparent background for the photos like I mentioned in the last post. A friend suggested I try saving the image in .gif rather than .jpg and that nearly worked, just had some excess stuff showing up where it was supposed to be transparent. I finally decided to just turn the background a solid color, then match that on the webpage so they blend. The Dragon Moray above is the same one from last May or so, only the background has been blacked out.

Anyway, it was with some trepidation that I did this, as the website is the business's lifeline. In many ways, it's a lot less "noisy" website now and some people may prefer the look, previously the blue wavy stuff that surrounds the blog played a prominent role on the first page, now it's much more subdued. I've tried to keep as many elements from before as possible so I don't get dinged by search engines and lose traffic - search engine optimization is some kind of mystery for the most part, but I'm thinking I'm getting a little clued in over time.

Pat's off in Oregon visiting friends, it'll be interesting to hear her opinion on it. I've tried cleaning it up some, keeping (actually adding) photos and adding some extra information on the front page that people had to search for before. You can check it out here.

Aloha,

Steve

So does anyone out there "get" Facebook and other social networking sites? I just put up a page for my Kona scuba diving biz....

When I've gone to DEMA (the big dive manufacturer and marketing show) the last couple of years I've sat through a couple of seminars. Nearly all of the marketing related ones mentioned "social networking sites are the one of the new hot marketing tools" or something to that effect. I set up a myspace page after one of those seminars a couple of years back, and that held my interest for all of the length of time it took to sign up... I just couldn't "get" it. Even though my wife says I often act 13-15 years old, I just didn't feel comfortable in there right off the bat.

Well, after some deliberation, and a trial personal page, I've set up a Facebook page for "Wanna Dive Kona". I figure at some point I'll figure out what I'm doing with the Facebook page and maybe down the line it'll pay off to some extent. Anyway, if any of you are Facebook members, drop in and check it out. So far I'm the only "fan" - kind of embarrassing, but I doubt these things take off overnight. I try to keep any real updates I have with the business current here, but I might as well do the same there and potentially reach some other people I'm not reaching through my other efforts.

So here's a cool photo that Pat took. It's a Tiger Moray (Scuticaria tigrina). We don't see them out all that often. I've seen far more body parts through the coral than heads sticking out looking around over the years. This one was pretty active for daytime. The larger ones often look half dead, just plain don't move around a lot during the day. These guys are more roundish than the typical moray we have here, not much of a pronounced dorsal or anal fin, and look more snakelike - people occasionally ask if we have large sea snakes here, this is one of the eels they're seeing that make them wonder.

Surf should be down... bummer, I had charters when it was up that didn't go out. I'm hoping to get some phone calls now that the surf's back down to reasonable levels for diving.

later,

Steve

Heavy surf to start off the new year... water's cooling down too....

We've had heavy surf from the west/northwest the last 4 days or so. We've been able to get out and dive during the daytime, with most of the diving being limited to Pawai Bay/Old Airport area and the south Pine Trees dive sites.

We canceled our night dive on the 1st because we went up and checked out the bay off the Kona airport (home of the manta dive) that afternoon and there was basically 10 foot surf in shallow and little viz out to about the 60-80 foot depth. We checked it again on the 2nd and it was much better, doable but still not real nice conditions. Today the surf is down a bit and I suspect other sites are opening up again. We've got the day off today but have bookings the next several days.

The water temp off Kona is 75, maybe even 74, depending on the computer you use. It could get pretty cold this winter if the lack of 81-83 degree temperatures this fall is any indication. It pretty much topped out at about 79 this fall.

This picture is a re-post of a picture I took earlier in the year. If you are getting about 2/3rds of the photo on your screen, just click on it for the whole picture... I've never tried linking a full sized picasa picture before. Some of the message boards have "your favorite picture of '08" threads, and that got me to thinking - I think this is mine, although I really like some of the squid shots I took earlier this year too.

Aloha,

Steve

Night dive tonight...

We've got manta night dives scheduled for both tonight and tomorrow night. They're always fun. I was looking at a list of top 100 dives in the world this morning, and the Manta night dive here in Kona was #7.... not bad, it's truly a world class dive. Apparently the list was voted on by readers of some scuba diving magazine.

We've been pretty busy since returning from our vacation, which is good. November is usually a slow time for the dive industry here, and considering the water conditions are typically quite good in November that's kind of surprising, and this year's probably slower for a lot of folks doing business here because of the economic downturn and lower travel numbers (a report in the Honolulu paper said visitor arrivals for the Big Island was down 31% for September as compared to last year, it's down all over the state).

We just finished off a set of Open Water referral students and I've got one or two more groups of students scheduled up in next couple of weeks, along with our certified divers we take out on tours, so it looks like we'll stay reasonably busy for a November. We managed to see a lot of stuff on the training dives... several frogfish, indigo darts, several sets of flame angels, loads of butterflyfish and tangs, an octopus or two, morays and all.... Kona's a great place to do the open water diving end of a course because you get to see all that stuff in nice warm water - beats the heck out of doing your open water dives in a muddy quarry or lake for the most part.

Here's a decent sized Yellow Margin Moray from last month before our trip.

Aloha,

Steve

Ironman triathlon in Kona Hawaii is this weekend, October 11th...

It's a fairly busy week here in Kona... Ironman is this Saturday. Ironman is likely the world's most famous triathlon event, held here annually for almost three decades. I can still remember the big worldwide showing of the '82 Ironman on television where the woman who was leading collapsed just short of the finish line and was passed after what seemed like minutes of crawling (she eventually made it) which turned into a huge PR boon for the event.

The only time I've gone downtown to see the finish of the race was back when I was here on vacation over a decade ago.. lots of good energy... I was really impressed that there were people in the miles before the finish line looking at contestant's numbers on their shirts with binoculars, then looking up the names and cheering them on by name as they passed to finish the last miles of the race... pretty cool. Being the slow season in October, we're sometimes out of town that weekend, most of the times I've been here I've just avoided the traffic and stayed home. The town pretty much shuts down, at least the north end of it outside of downtown, that day. I'm debating between heading downtown for some good energy or just watching college football for the day and avoiding the crowds.

We've been having fun on our charters this week. We had our newly certified students on board yesterday and did a one way drift north of Hoover's (the northern most mooring off the Kona airport) that I led... I love that dive... lots of pinnacles, saw a flame angel, a big spiny lobster in a hole, a very cool Reticulated Frogfish (which I'll post a pic of on my next post) in a coral head, and DOLPHINS UNDERWATER ON THE DIVE!!!! Yes, I have a very few seconds of that on video to be posted later...

Here's a photo of a Zebra Moray (Gymnomuraena zebra) that we came across on that dive.

later,

Wow, we've had some great diving conditions in Kona Hawaii recently...

The "summer" water conditions we've been wanting finally hit now that it's officially autumn. It's been really flat. The other day we did a dive down off "shark fin rock", off the old airport park, and one of our divers said he'd looked up when they got to 100' of depth and he could still see the boat... thing is, they were over 100' away from the boat at the time, and if I recall my 10th grade math correctly the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the length of the legs of a right triangle ... in other words we had really great viz... I can't figure out square roots anymore now that I'm old and getting gray in the cerebrum these days.

Later,

Steve

You can google almost anything, doesn't necessarily mean you'll find what you're looking for....

So every now and then I check into my visitor results for the blog to see how people found it... sometimes the way people find it are somewhat amusing... today someone found this blog by googling "Porta potty cleaner job in hilo". I got a kick out of that search - turns out if you do that search right now, my blog is the top result.

In the past I used to be one of the top results for "hawaiian chicken thighs" and "beer can chicken", but I no longer place well in those searches anymore, guess I'm not doing so hot with the barbequing crowd these days. Anyway, google has some magic formula to find relevant results and it's interesting to see what I temporarily place well for sometimes.

A little blog housekeeping... I've never really stated a "comment policy". Several months ago I was getting bombarded by spammers, primarily in the travel industry, so I added comment moderation to the blog. I flat out delete pure spam. I also decided at that time I'm not going to print direct links to product or non-subject related blog posts. I've got a handful of comments I'm sitting on that were good comments, but contained links that I consider to be re-directs for my readers. I can't figure out how to edit out the links, so I oppologise to those who aren't seeing their posts. I've got no problem with identity profiles linking back to other blogs or websites, but I'm basically not approving what I consider unrelated re-directs or commercial links in signatures following the comments. If I'm posting a frogfish pic and someone says "cool pic, did you see this post about a frogfish that ate a diver" with a link to that post... I'd post it (assuming it were genuine that'd be one heck of a big frogfish)... but comments followed by links to t-shirts for sale with frogfish on them, or vacation rentals in Maui (or anywhere else for that matter) or just plain unrelated blogs aren't going to pass the moderation. I realize commenting to help generate traffic is pretty commonly done by bloggers... in my case just make sure your identity is clickable (blogger.com identities work well) has the appropriate hidden link and I've got no problem posting most comments.

So the eel pic above is another shot of a Dragon Moray (Enchelycore pardalis) that I posted a shot of a couple months back. Look back through the archives, click on the "moray eel" label below, or do a search for dragon eel in the search bar at the top left of my blog page to see a couple of other shots of this and another dragon eel or two. Dragon eels are around, but we don't see them often so they're a highly prized find. More often than not, when I do find them what I first notice is the distinctive pattern on the body in a hole in the coral as they don't seem to spend quite as much time with their heads looking out as some of our more common eels.

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