Shore diving Kona Hawaii...Some of the best shore diving in the State...

Kona has a number of very decent shore dives. Unlike the other islands in the chain, we're mostly a rocky shoreline and there are no rivers or streams on our side of the island. That makes for very good water clarity on most days.

This was an OK day, nothing special. My guess is I took this video maybe 70 feet from shore. The Place of Refuge is neat in that you can step off the entry rock and be in 6 feet of reef from the get-go. Yellow tangs are often literally eating at your fin tips as you step in. There's a good expanse of 9-30 foot deep reef out front and then it drops to deeper than recreational diving depths in just a short swim.

As much as I like running dive charters, there's good diving to be had for those who are in to shorediving.

Aloha,

Steve

Typical reef scene out on the edge of a drop off in Kona.....

The other day I decided to set down the camera on a rock and swim away for a couple minutes before returning. It's a neat coincidence that a spotted eagle ray swam through the video right before I came back in the scene.

I need to figure out how to do a custom white balance with the G9, I've just never tried since I've been shooting all my stills in RAW and can adjust them after the fact. I'm guessing the video will look pretty sharp once I can figure out how to get white balance right at depth.

If you enlarge the video (by clicking on the box in the lower right when you put your cursor on the video) it's almost like being there. No whales were singing near the site on that day, bummer.

later,

Steve

Scuba Diving in Kona Hawaii.....

Hi again,

The last post was sorta commercial, but hopefully informative for some, so I thought I'd bump it down a post.

I really don't post many pics of divers doing their thing. Part of it is I don't want to infringe on anyone's privacy and lots of times I take pictures with divers in them I'm close enough to really tell who they are, and more often than not, when I take a shot from a distance it comes out crummy to where I can't photoshop it well. Typically they get tons of red in them after the fixes, these I took out as much red as I could. I'm hoping with the RAW function on the Canon G9 (which I really didn't use on my Olympus sp-350) I'll be able to get a relatively accurate color of the deeper scenes.

Diving in Kona is different from many places in that nearly all of our dive sites have both deep and shallow water. We can take the group down the dropoffs (which usually start at about 35-40 feet and drop to beyond recreational diving depths) for a while to explore and look for larger fish and occasional oddball critters, then spend the bulk of the dive up in the shallower reef, which typically richer in live coral and it's associated fish/critter colletion. This can make for some nice longer and more varied dives than if we had a flat "X" feet deep bottom to dive on.

For those following the torn hamstring misadventure - my leg's coming along well from my earlier injury so I'm heading down to the boat tomorrow to crawl around on the boat for a while and make sure it doesn't affect my ability to work. I'm planning on working again this week if all goes as expected.

Aloha,

Steve