Our divers saw a Naked Lady while scuba diving Kona, but the highlight of the dive was the submarine....

Today we dove the wreck of the Naked Lady. It's a 48ish foot long ferro-cement hull out in Kailua Bay sitting in 105-109 feet of water. Because of the depth and the fact that you're looking at a deep and short dive, we don't get there all that often. The sinking of the boat occurred long before I arrived here, but from what I understand, a fire occurred out on a sailboat in the bay and a naked woman turned up at Kailua pier screaming "the aliens are coming" or something along those lines. The story's probably morphed over the years to this... but it could've happened that way?

This wreck is a mixed bag, sometimes there's a fair amount of stuff hanging out, sometimes there's very little. Today they found a shrimp or two and a good sized yellow margin moray and not a lot more in the way of critters. During the dive they could hear the Atlantis submarine (yep, there's a tour sub in Kona that actually goes to 104') and then suddenly it came out of the blue and our divers and their passengers all got a good look at each other. The first diver up commented that she'd never had so many people taking pictures of her diving before. It'd be nice to be able to time that dive so the sub comes by, but it's kind of by luck, as it's a nice turn of events if there's not a lot of fish life hanging around at the time.

Cathy led the dive, this is a picture she took of the sub. You can see the tip of the Naked Lady laying on the sand to the left.

Later,

Steve

A rare windy day in Kona Hawaii...

Last week we had a windy day, well three of them. Normally the winds run east to west in Hawaii and the volcanoes block the winds from much of the Kona area. Last week there was a front parked somewhere that brought in a ton of wind from the north. It was still quite diveable, in fact the viz was well over a hundred feet underwater the day I took this video.

Funny thing is, back in the day I was diving the Oregon coast, we would be totally thrilled to have this kind of day for diving. We're spoiled here.

Seahorses and scuba diving in Kona....

We've been really busy diving the last month or so. Diving conditions have been good, we've had some big winds, and finally a couple days of rain (thank goodness, we've been having a drought and the local green was turning brown) but those don't generally effect the scuba diving here.

So we're diving outside of the harbor and one of the divers came up from the dive and starts talking seahorses, apparently he'd taken a photo of a seahorse on the mooring line. He showed me a pic, it was blurry but it was definitely a seahorse. I was bummed because I was up top captaining and I didn't have a housing for my camera handy that day. When the next diver came up, he mentioned the seahorse was RUBBER. The diver with the camera was so intent on the back of his camera LCD that he didn't notice the algae covered tie wrap holding it on, and the wind was up that day and shaking the boat so the mooring line was bouncing around and the seahorse did look like it was moving. When Bob surfaced, I mentioned the divers saw a seahorse on the mooring line... well he was all over that and descended immediately - came back up smiling and saying "that would be the rare Hawaiian rubber seahorse".

One of the other dive groups had obviously mounted it down there. Apparently there's a rubber snake on the other side of the chain as well. We do see seahorses here from time to time... mostly at the boat washdown... The Big Island doesn't really have any readily findable reef seahorses, we have a deep water/open ocean species that the fishermen see at night when they hang lights. Occasionally they'll clean a mahi-mahi and one will fall out of the entrails, that's how we see the most of them. Apparently Hawaii does have a reef species or two that can be found on rare occasions on the older islands, and I heard of a sighting on the reef up in Puako this last year, but seahorses are not one of the things we expect to see here at all.

Here's a shot of a couple of Moorish Idols (Zanclus cornutus) on the reef that Pat took. These attractive fish are always a pleasure to see, and we see them quite often. Most people will say they saw an "angelfish", the true angelfish species we have look nothing like a freshwater angelfish you'd see in an aquarium. The Moorish Idols are in their own family, sharing many of the traits of our butterflyfish and surgeonfish.

Aloha,

Steve

Busy week full of dive charters in Kona ahead....

Well, I know my schedule for the next 5 days. I'm basically full through Friday. There's plenty of openings after that, hopefully things will continue to be busy.

Today was an awesome day on the water. There was essentially no swell this morning. We headed out for a couple of nice dives. I Captained the boat, have a very mild cold (popped so much vitamin C the last couple of days I'm turning orange) and need to be ready to finish off a student tomorrow. Bob and the group dove Golden Arches and Kaloko Arches, we had a pair of whales milling around maybe 200-250 feet off of both dive sites during the dives. I was hopeful the divers might get a peek at them, no such luck today.

We semi-officially opened the "shop" above the Tesoro across the highway from the harbor this weekend. We're going to man it 10-6 on the weekends and then add more days as we can. I'm still spending time after charters there every day I don't have a night dive on top of the day charter, so we're actually around in the late afternoons on most days 'til about 6pm. My wife Pat was manning it today.

Here's a very nice shot of a Wire Coral Goby that Pat took on a dive a while back. It's the best one we've got between the two of us. This is a magnified version of the real thing. These little guys spend pretty much their entire lives on wire corals.

Aloha,

Steve

Underwater video of Flame Angel in Kona Hawaii...

Flame angelfish from Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.

Today's dive charter had great diving conditions. Cathy led the first dive and I did the second. On the second dive we did a one way dive (moor, put the divers in, then dive in one general direction and have the boat follow the bubbles and pick up the divers at the end of the dive) over an area I hadn't actually dove in one single dive before. We saw Flame Angelfish (Centropyge loriculus) in a couple of spots on the dive.

Flame angels are a fish I'm quite familiar with from my days in the aquarium trade a couple decades back. We generally had Philippine flames in those days, the Hawaiian ones seem to be a bit deeper red. When I first moved here, the flame angels were few and far between. I'd see maybe 2-3 a year, mostly on shore dives I did, and almost none on the dive sites commonly frequented by the boats. Back in 2000 they established FRAs (fish replenishment areas) along 30 percent of the coastline on the west side of the Big Island. I don't know if the flame angels were heavily targeted by aquarium collectors (they're tough to catch because they dart into the coral) and whether that had a huge effect on the population, but around 2005/2006 we started seeing them more frequently, and now it seems we see them on the majority of our dives. They are no longer an uncommon sighting.

These are one of my favorite fish, they're very tough to get a decent shot of because they're so prone to darting off or into the corals the moment you're ready to take a shot, so I took a quick video of one just so you'd get an idea of how this fish acts.

I've got a pretty full dive charter tomorrow... it's time to snooze....zzzzzzzzz

Lots of good scuba diving lately in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii....

I've been really busy this month. We had a slow September so October has been a pleasant surprise. Today we had the day off, so it was football day... we had some Corvallis, Oregon area friends visiting so we all sat down and watched the USC Trojans vs. the Oregon State Beavers football game. Good game, our team was on the wrong end of the 6 point game though.

Water conditions for scuba diving in Kona have been pretty darned good lately. We've had a run of very good divers on the boat the last several weeks, so nearly all of our dives have been in the 75-90 minute range. Bob's off in Sulawesi Indonesia for some diving fun, so Cathy and I have been splitting all of the diving the past couple of weeks.

I haven't been carrying a camera around since my G9 stopped working. Tomorrow we've got a light load with a couple of gals carrying cameras, so I might take my wife's older camera down to see if I can get some shots off. I'm so spoiled these days, after diving with a camera with a 3" LCD for a couple of years, we'll see if I can tolerate going back to something with a large postage stamp sized LCD screen. I've got my eye on 2 models right now, the Canon G11 and the Canon S90. I'm waiting to see what comes out for housings from third parties for them in the next couple of weeks. I'll discuss more of what I'm looking at in a later post.

Since I'm not taking pics right now, I'm playing around with photoshop on some of the older ones. This pic has been on the blog before, maybe a year or so ago. My wife, Pat, took this frogfish shot on a dive. My older version of it had a hotspot on the forehead, this one we managed to tone it down a bit. I'm looking at downloading the new beta version of Lightroom my next day off and playing around with it to see how well the slider adjustments work on my older jpegs.

Aloha,

Steve

Orange Cup Coral from Kona Hawaii....

I did a dive last week at Pawai Bay out on the Kaiwi Point end. There's a bunch of cup coral on a large formation near the point and the current was screaming when we were down so the polyps were out bigtime.

We had a huge southwest swell during the last half of June. I'd heard people mention it was one of the largest in decades but I hadn't thought much of it 'til this dive. Everything on the west end of the dive was as normal, but in one area of the site there was noticeable damage.... large lobe coral formations were sheared off and tossed out of place, often upside down. Wow. The area between Carousel and the Body Glove mooring had quite a bit of breakage. I'm wanting to check out the reef more inshore and to the south to see if it was damaged also. All of our sites that weren't directly in the path of the swell are fine. Quite interesting, it's amazing how much power a little surf has.

later,

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

Water temperature in Kona Hawaii is bumping up... making for some great scuba diving...

Aloha,
Back to diving again every day for a while... the month has turned into a fairly busy one and June's starting to fill with charters.... plenty of space still on most days.

Here's a shot of a Bandit Angelfish (Apolemichthys arcuatus - the genus on this fish has changed at least twice since I first saw them back in my aquarium shop days). We found this one on Friday. Hawaii only has a very few species of angelfish, and this is by far the largest (reaches 7 inches or so). We saw a pair of them but I couldn't really get any good shots with both of the fish in them. On the Big Island, we typically see them below 60 feet or so, more likely below 80. In the older islands further north, say Kauai and to the northwest, they apparently are shallower and seen more often.

Today the water was very flat and we decided to head south to the Red Hill area for dives. We dove at "Ridges" and "Henry's Cave". Bob led the first dive and I led the second. Good conditions... the water's really warming up the last 2 weeks, it's roughly 76/77 now suddenly. I shed the shorty I was layering with and just went with my full suit and was fine. Out at depth on the edge of the reef we probably had roughly 150 foot of viz. A manta ray swam beneath us as we descended and one of the divers saw two turtles in the distance. Other cool stuff was a pair of Flame Angels, a real good sized (child's fist sized roughly) yellow hairy hermit crab that had taken over a beautiful triton trumpet snail shell, a three foot (pretty small) or so long whitetip reef shark and other goodies. Surprisingly we didn't see much in the way of shrimp or nudibranchs, seems to be the case down south lately when we've been there for some reason, even though both sites appear to be topographically good candidates for them.

Scrambled egg nudibranchs? Fried egg nudibranchs? Whatever.... they're neat looking no matter what you call 'em....

We're winding down on a real busy spell, I may actually get a planned day off come Friday and Saturday if the phone doesn't ring for those days. We've been doing lots of diving this month, I generally do the second dive of the day while Cathy's been doing the first... if we alternate dives, the customers get two slightly different style of guided dives during the day, kind of a yin/yang thing, Bob comes back tomorrow, so we'll be able to spread the diving out between us some - guess that'll make it more of a rock/paper/scissors experience at that point.

I was able to sleep in today, not that it really happened, as we're doing the night dive today. The mantas have been showing up in good numbers up at Garden Eel Cove for the last little bit.

Water conditions have been consistently good for diving the last little bit, and the water temperature has inched up a degree or two making it much more comfortable... Yahoo!!!

Aloha,

Steve

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

The burning question....

Late at night, when you're tossing and turning and just can't get back to sleep, you're probably asking yourself... "I wonder what dive boats serve for lunch?". Well, it runs the gamut. Some operators provide little, others feed you pretty well. As far as it goes for us, it's a choice of sandwiches, garden or chef salad from a local deli and a mix of individually wrapped assorted junk foods... yum, yum... along with waters or sport drinks. I try to stick with commercially prepared pre-packaged individually wrapped items, 'cause in my way of thinking dive boats aren't necessarily the most sterile of environments, and I know from experience (not on dive boats, but elsewhere) food poisoning isn't all that fun. I wouldn't consider it a veritable scu-buffet, but it tides most people over 'til they can grab a late lunch after a day of diving.

Here's a shot of some of what we try to offer.

The shot at the top is of a yellow morph of a Spotted Puffer (Arothron meleagris). This color is quite rare in the Hawaiian Islands, but more common in other parts of the South Pacific. I'm trying to get just the fish with a transparent background and I'm having troubles, I don't know if it's a blogger thing or if it's something I'm doing in photoshop incorrectly. If I can figure it out, I may try doing some similar stuff with my main website for the dive business. It's in need of a refreshing, I haven't done much with the front page in years... I'm kind of leery about doing too much and messing up my search engine positioning, but it's long overdue for a slightly different look.

later,

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

Let's discuss working as a Divemaster or Instructor for a bit.... pay, getting a job and such....

Aloha,
Quite some time ago I solicited some questions and reader Mel asked these.... "What do you typically look for when hiring a divemaster? (Qualities, skills, type of experience, etc.)" and "Is it possible for a DM to make a living wage in the Kona area?". I haven't answered these yet so I thought I'd try now.

Part of what got me thinking about this was a phone call I got back in October or so. I had a Course Director (essentially Instructors that teach how to become Instructors... not a whole lot of them working in Kona right now) from Colorado call me asking about work, if I recall correctly he was looking at moving out this way in the following month. Course Director is a desirable qualification, but not one that is needed at my business at this point. Anyway, I filled him in the best I could giving him the names of a couple of shops that might possibly be large enough to hold an occasional Instructor Development Course. As we were ending our conversation he wished me good luck on my "upcoming season"... I couldn't bring myself to tell him Kona's busy winter dive season is typically December 20th through January 3rd or thereabouts... the holidays were hopping this year, but boy did the number of boats on the water drop as of Sunday. There's a lot of people who think "snowbirds" will keep the diving community busy all winter, but the reality is that not all that large of a percentage of that group are divers, and while places like the Florida Keys are just a few hour air flight from over half the population of the US and see a lot of people taking a long weekend to dive, we're a bit harder to get to so the busy dive times tend to surround typical vacation breaks. I wonder if he had any luck getting on anywhere. Personally, if I were to come here out of the blue looking for a scuba job, I'd do it the first week of June and keep my fingers crossed that things pick up by the end of the month, as summers are the longest "busy" season we have here. If he found his way to Maui, which arguably doesn't have quite the diving Kona does, but has lots more tourists and hotels, he might have been able to hook up with some steady work.

On to what I look for when looking for a DM... Personally, I've been lucky in that I've known, and in most cases worked with elsewhere, every person I've hired for quite a while. That really helps because I've known their ability, local knowledge and disposition already. I'm lucky enough to have employees who've been leading dives in Kona and Hawaii for one to three decades each rather than having to rely on people who just became Instructors or just moved here. Odds are if I do need someone else in the next couple of years it just might be someone who's already working here, but you never know. To me the local knowledge is important, but really loving diving and really liking meeting new people are probably more important. Enthusiasm and sociability skills are darned important on a 6 pack boat, and probably at a premium on any boat. If I were a dive operator with a shop, retail skills would be real important. An Instructor's certification and a Captain's license are a big plus, especially for my particular business. I'd guess the larger portion of the "DMs" here in Kona are actually Instructors, but there are some DMs who either came up through classes in the local shops or walked in the right place at the right time and have found work.

Occasionally I get some bright, enthusiastic people approaching me for a job, but they have no scuba leadership certifications or Captain's license. I'd love to be in the position to give them some work, but unfortunately that doesn't work on the boat, there's really no such position as a "deck hand" on the dive boats, at least the smaller ones... people who fall into this category need to look at a boat with a shop (and then get the leadership certification to get work on the boat) or look at getting on a boat that primarily services tourists other than divers.

Wages... not really a subject we talk about that much. When I came over in '99 the prevailing wage worked out to between $65 and $75 bucks a charter. There are some DMs/Instructors getting a higher wage, and apparently some getting lower still these days. Some are paid a decent hourly wage, but aren't necessarily guaranteed full time work, so in the end you're likely still talking Taco Bell earning levels for a lot of divers in the business. Many divers here have second jobs to make ends meet, have additional incomes, or are semi-retired and don't necessarily need full time work (that's a huge bonus to their employers). I gotta be vague because the wages run the gamut here, I know of dive guides making anywhere from Zip (working for free) to 15/17 bucks an hour but not necessarily full time.

Working in this trade is more about lifestyle than earning power for the vast majority of people here by my guess. I've seen lots of faces come and go, but several that have made it work for a number of years. I'm not sure that it's any different here than anywhere else. It's a wonderful time when you can make it work.

Here's a rather blurry shot of a small group of Bicolor Anthias (Pseudanthias bicolor). They're a real colorful smaller fish, often found in deeper waters (this is in about 90') in coral heads in or next to sand patches here. If you are out poking around in a deep sand patch it's not uncommon to see a lone coral head with a group of fish surrounding it, as you approach closer they'll pull into the coral head for protection. They're commonly found in heads that have a cleaner shrimp, pictured here in the lower right.

Later,

Steve

...the sharks at this site, their mouths are this big....

Here's a shot of Cathy giving a pre-dive briefing. OK, she's not really talking about sharks, probably something more innocuous like the length of coronet fish. At each site we like to talk about the things you are likely to see at the site. Many fish are territorial and so at most of our sites we've got a good idea of what you'll see and we try to point out a few highlights before the dive.

So our yucky weather and water conditions last week was relatively short lived. It's been gorgeous out on the water the last few days. They were predicting a big swell by now last weekend... couldn't tell it by today as it was nice and flat. We've seen lots of neat stuff the last few days. The highlight of yesterday and today both was dolphins underwater. We were up at "Hoover's" up by the airport yesterday on the second dive and there was a huge group of dolphins that came by spread out from around the corner up north during the dive, the divers saw about 30 of them, they came down to the boat and turned around and passed our divers again... but this time they all passed right over and around our divers, Cathy figured there were at least a 100 that they saw on that pass. Today Bob did Naia/Crescent Beach/Manta Ray bay (or whatever it's called, depending on the operator) on the second dive and had 12-15 or so come by him and his diver (very light load the last couple of days, several companies didn't even go out today).

The water temp is still in the upper 70's, but it's feeling a bit cooler. Tomorrow we're doing a night dive trip. We did one earlier in the week and had 2 mantas early on, but only one stayed for the bulk of the dive. One's enough to give a pretty good show, but we love it when there's more.

later,

Steve

Fourspot Butterflyfish (Chaetodon quadrimaculatus)

Here's a shot of a couple 4 Spot butterfly fish that Pat took. These guys are quite attractive and fairly common, but I'm thinking they're somewhat under appreciated as I can't recall ever hearing any divemaster brief for them. We see them picking in and around corals on the reef quite often.

So our surf went down Saturday night and Sunday morning it was like glass out on the water 'til the wind picked up later on the day. This particular surf episode messed things up for about 2 days. I didn't take my camera as I wasn't diving (got some kind of infection/bug that'll keep me out of the water for a few days) and I regretted it as Sunday morning was one of those days you could see the reflections of the clouds on the water. When we got to our mooring, the water was exceptionally clear. It's amazing how it can go from nasty surf to great conditions overnight here - One of the nice thing about a young island is that the shore is mostly rock so there's little sand or soil to get stirred up and keep the viz down. Anyways, the last couple of days the diving's been terrific... 2 frogfish, a shark, dolphins underwater, a hawksbill turtle and a whole lot more for the divers. Water temp is inching down to 77/78 degrees but hasn't taken a big drop just yet.

Starting Thursday, I'll probably be running charters at least once a day for the rest of the month. I still have a couple days wide open Christmas week and several spots to fill on most of the days, but the month's filling in fast.

Aloha,

Steve

Flame angels and other stuff.....

We're busy for the next little bit with a student and several certified divers. Today we had a rather strong north wind from a front that was passing by, didn't do anything to the diving but it made it look kind of rough 'til it settled down mid-day. Conditions have been pretty reasonable, we had a bit of a swell last week, but Thursday was really the only day that it made for crummy conditions. I've not personally been in the water since Wednesday, tomorrow that'll change as I plan on working with the student. Cathy said it feels as though it's cooled off the last couple of days, so it'll be curious to see if I'm noticing it or if it shows cooler on my computer. We're getting into that time of year where if a big north swell comes in the temperature drops a degree or so.

We had a fun group on the other day. I thought I'd mention it because the entire boatload was very good on air. I'm thinking the shortest dive for any in the group was in the 70 minute range, and we had two divers hit the 100 minute mark (that's real good on air and we don't see that all too often) on one dive.

Blogstuff... I added a little mapping widget on the sidebar. If you click on the map you get a larger map and can see where clicks are coming from. It's kind of interesting to see where people are popping in from, and sort of amazing that that type of information can be tracked.

So here's another Flame Angel (Centropyge loriculus). I took this one using the long zoom/no flash diffuser and hope for the best method I mentioned several posts back. These guys are generally so shy you can't get within 5' of them without spooking them into the coral within seconds. Recently I found one that seems rather unphased by close company with divers, but I didn't have a camera in hand that day. I'm hoping it's there the next time I visit. Flame Angels have a very small territory and once you find them you can almost count on seeing them at the same spot (I really mean spot, often within a foot or two) an a frequent basis. If we brief Flame angels, that generally means we know exactly where it's going to be.... I've got a flame angel at one frequently visited site that I've been watching since early 2005 that I've seen all but 3 or 4 times I've been there since finding it. We're coming across more of them all the time as there seems to be a bit of a bloom of them lately.

Later,

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

Kailua's really quiet right now...

Ironman is over and the town emptied out quite quickly. Pat and I were running errands today and drove through town and it was about as empty as you'll see in on a late afternoon.

We had a pretty good swell come in during yesterday's dives. Today it was coming in real good from the north, it's supposed to be coming down tomorrow. We'll just dive some south facing dive sites and stay clear of the north facing ones for an extra day.

I've been trying to get a decent shot of a Flame Angel (Centropyge loriculus) for quite some time. They're really tough to get a photo of because they are very shy and flighty and will dart into the finger corals if you approach them or swim above them. They used to be pretty rarely seen a few years back, but they're seen quite a bit more often these days.

I saw 5 of them on my dive yesterday. I saw this one towards the end of the dive and decided to try something... in underwater photography, the general rule is get as close as possible, get as little water between you and your subject as possible. As this is really really difficult to do with Flame Angels I decided to take a different tack. The Canon G9 camera has a pretty darned powerful flash, and you usually use the diffuser to help it light up your subject as the flash is very directional and won't get good coverage when shooting close. I decided to not use the diffuser and see if the flash was strong enough to light up the Flame Angel at a longer distance with the camera really zoomed in. The first of these pics was taken at the usual distance before removing the diffuser, I was just lucky to see it for a moment and get a shot off. The second one was taken at a distance of about 5 feet without the diffuser on the flash. This is about a 2 and a half inch fish so the camera was really zoomed in for that shot, but it worked OK. I'm thinking Pat actually has some better pictures of one, but these give you a great idea of how colorful this little fish is.

Later,

Steve