We're coming into the best season / time of year for scuba diving in Kona Hawaii...

It's that time of year again... summer's over, crowds are down, water's warm and flat. We always look forward to September through November as it's probably the nicest water conditions of the year - not that they're bad at other times - it's just consistantly good for the most part.

We've had some really good diving lately. Been seeing lots of critters. Highlights of the last week or so have been frogfish, scorpion fish, flame angels, psychedelic wrasses, flame wrasses, a HAMMERHEAD!, leaf scorpions, and more. The manta ray night dive has been crazy busy, with both boats and mantas. We've been going out 2-3 night a week (a lot for us, we've only got 3 people to cover 7 days and 3 nights of diving) on top of the daily morning dives. Manta numbers have been in the teens the last couple weeks pretty much every night. The boat numbers on that dive are starting to shrink now that school's starting everywhere and tourist numbers are dropping.

Here's a nice frogfish that we've been watching grow. It's in the 5-6 inch length right now, was much smaller when Cathy found it earlier this summer. It's amazing how fast they grow. It's pretty "clean" and yellow right now. As they grow it'll get all sorts of red stuff growing on it (you can see it starting in spots) and start changing colors.

Later,

Steve

What can you see scuba diving in Kona Hawaii?

Here's a wonderful photo of a Longnose Hawkfish we've been watching over time sent to me by one of our customers. These are one of my favorite fish back from my aquarium shop days. I don't happen to have a photo of one, I'm thrilled they got this fantastic shot.

This post will be unlike others I've done. I was looking at their photos and thinking about how much variety of critters and types of diving we typically do over the course of 3-4 days... and thought I'd give you just a taste of it from a customer that was on the boat for 4 charters. We try to mix up the diving when we have people on for several days. The photos here are unedited and posted at a low resolution to save some space.... it's just a few of the many photos they took, don't even have shots of the whaleshark or dolphins they saw underwater on one dive... Thanks for the photos Roman....



















There are tons of critters and sites to see when scuba diving, it's easy to pack a lot of variety into a few short dives in Kona.

Aloha,

Steve

Kona scuba diving with manta rays.....

Manta rays from Kona Hawaii, April 2010 from Steve on Vimeo.

Here's a 2 minute video I took on last night's manta dive. We had 3 customers on the boat and went up for the night dive. It was a very good show. We spent 48 minutes watching the mantas, the last few minutes most of the other divers had left the manta area and the mantas were closer than in the video here... lots of head bumps at that point. At the end we did about a 15 minute reef tour taking the circular way back to the boat to find a couple of mantas under the boat. Fun evening.

Today was gorgeous in Kona the first part of the day, turned a bit gray later on. We had a charter this morning with the 3 from last night and a couple of intro divers. Cathy and a DM/Captain friend who's filling in for Bob (Bob's in the Phillipines diving right now... jealous) switched off with the certified divers, I took the intros. The intro divers did very well, did dives of 60 and 55 minutes. For those of you who don't dive, intro dives are something to consider if you enjoy snorkeling and are comfortable in the water. You essentially get the full diving experience without taking the course. My intros from today had never dove before this trip, today was their second outing with us... they're getting to be pretty good "divers" and should consider getting certified in the future - Intro dives are a good way to get an idea if scuba diving is for you without committing time and money into a full class.

Later,

Steve

Scuba diving with wild spinner dolphins in Kona Hawaii...

Went scuba diving... dolphins swam by from Steve on Vimeo.

It's uncommon, but every now and then we're lucky enough to have dolphins swim around us on dives. A couple days back we were out on a dive up at Makalawena and the moment we entered the water we were greeted with the sounds of whale songs. A couple minutes later I heard the dolphin sounds and looked over my head to find this pod approaching. On the first clip the dophins were right there, this is zoomed out wide, they were probably within 5-8 feet of me at one point. It was a pretty good sized pod and I was lucky enough to be carrying a camera, I think this is the first dive shots of dolphins I have.

We've been real busy with charters this month, busiest February in at least a couple of years, if ever, for us. Next month is looking good at this point and Pat and I are working on a plan to open the shop portion of our Kona dive business for regular hours on weekends starting about the middle of next month. It'll take a while, but eventually we'll have the shop open full time - it's by appointment or luck at this point as we're open around our charter schedule.

I'm in the shop today for a half day, I've got a manta ray night dive night dive meeting up at 3:15 this afternoon. Last night they apparently had 10 mantas up at Garden Eel Cove, hopefully it'll be another great show tonight.

Aloha,

Steve

Scuba dive Kona Hawaii with Wanna Dive.....

Sorry for the title on this post... just giving the search engines something to look at (maybe, not sure it really does anything). We've had some really nice diving the last couple of days. Tuesday morning it was pretty flat on the ocean so we decided to take the boat down to the Red Hill area of South Kona and do a drive at a site called Driftwood (Bob's favorite spot in that area)... got there and a private boat was just tieing up, so we moved on over to Lava Dome/Coral Dome (not sure which it is most often called), which is one of my favorite spots in that area. This particular site features a lot of little cuts/shelves/mini-canyons to poke around in and a very good sized dome feature inshore that is very reminiscent of the 1st cathedral on Lanai.... it's a cool dive. After that dive we moved on up nearer the harbor to Eel Cove for another nice dive. Water conditions were fantastic, and we saw lots of whales on the trips to and back from the first dive site.

Yesterday we had a combination of north swells, light southwest winds and a boat full of newer divers so we went on down to Pawai Bay to get out of the swells. Had a couple of real nice dives and then it was time to head home. By then the south winds were howling, and the northwest swells were coming up. When that happens, and the wind is strong enough, the swells get bunched into a series of back to back mini-walls of water. Fortunately that is very rare here, I've probably been in water like that a handful of times in the years I've been doing this. It was nasty enough that the waves were breaking in deep water, luckily my boat's a Radon, originally made for rough water urchin harvesting from what I understand, and is quite heavy for it's size so it handled the conditions quite well. I'm just glad the conditions hadn't turned like that on our long trip south, it'd been a long slow ride home if that were the case. I can usually cruise around at 20-24 mph when I'm covering some distance, it wouldn't have been so yesterday. Anyways, we had fantastic whale action on the way back from Pawai Bay.

This has turned into a relatively busy February for us. I've noticed the companies with multiple boats are actually using multiple boats this year, I'm not sure that was the case last February. It looks like the tourist numbers might be inching upwards if my guess is correct.

Here's an underwater photo of a Longnose Butterfly. They're one of our more common reef fishes here. Hawaii technically has two species of Longnose Butterfly, a short snouted one that is found throughout the Indo-Pacific, and an endemic (only found here) species with a significantly longer snout. Oddly enough, the frequency of which one you see can vary greatly depending on which island you are on. The "common" longnose is readily seen on Oahu, they rarely see the longer nosed endemic one.... here the longer nosed fish is quite common. We even see the black phase version of the endemic species here, I'll show you that on the next post.

Aloha,

Steve

The latest in Kona scuba diving....

Man was it windy yesterday. We ended up rescheduling last night's night dive for tonight. We had a front come by and park over the island or something because we had huge winds all day long 'til evening. When that happens it's usually a one day event... it's quite nice today.

One of the nice things about Kona scuba diving is that we're generally protected from winds that much of the island chain sees on a regular basis. This makes for all day diving on most days.

We're starting to see the winter swells coming in. So far the swells haven't been too bad here, we're fairly shaded by the other islands, so we don't see as much big water. I'll be keeping an eye on the west swell today. We're supposedly getting some huge stuff coming in starting Sunday/Monday. They're talking upwards of 40 foot faces on Oahu. There's been a couple of swells that were supposed to be in the 20 foot plus range off Oahu that basically didn't affect us at all in Kona the last couple of weeks, but a 40 foot swell usually means for big stuff here too... we'll be watching.

Here's a nice elkhorn coral head. We're always looking inside of these for critters, some of our nifty oddball fish tend to hang out in them.... Reticulated Frogfish, Leaf Scorpions, Gumdrop Gobies, Harlequin Shrimp and other stuff can be found on occasion.

Later,

Steve

Kona scuba diving has been great lately....

We've had some really great scuba diving in Kona lately. We did a night dive on Friday night, there was very little plankton but we had 6 manta rays putting on a good show for the crowd. I thought I'd have several days off the last few days, but I got a phone call or two and have been going out every day. Tonight we do the manta ray night dive again.

We've had a fun couple on board the last few days that have been diving here for years and are new to us. They were quite complementary yesterday, said they'd seen more new species on this trip than any dives here they can recall... part of that was site selection, part the fact that Cathy, Bob and I are into the fish and look hard, and part sheer luck - any given day you know. Anyways, it's been fun diving for both the passengers and the crew.

Their only complaint yesterday was after the first dive they mentioned... the dive would have been great, but every time they saw some cool fish to look at the dolphins would get in the way! They had a really good dolphin dive yesterday, along with a bunch of critters that were kind of uncommon. We've lucked into about 3 or 4 really good dolphin dives the last few weeks. I wish we could guarantee that, but it's kind of the luck of the draw.

I do have to report that the water temperature has dropped 3-4 degrees suddenly the last couple of weeks... brrrrrr... it's not really all that cold, but when you are used to 79/80 and it suddenly becomes 76/77 you feel the difference. I may be moving up in wetsuit thickness this winter if it drops below 74 again (last year it got down to 71 - very rare for here, it usually bottoms out around 74 degrees in the winter).

Here's an old (and not the best) shot of a Chevron Tang. We're seeing a lot of the 50 cent to silver dollar sized juveniles out right now, they're exceptionally brightly colored at that size, this photo doesn't do them justice. They become a large black tang as they mature.

Later,

Steve

Big Island Scuba Diving Blog.....

I just realized my blog is 4 years old now. Initially I figured on about a post a week, well 4 years and nearly 600 posts I'm a little above the number of posts I expected to be making... that's a lot of fish pictures.

The weather on the Big Island, at least Kona side, is gorgeous right now. The state had a flash flood watch out the last week or so, and a couple islands got hit with a lot of rain, we had about 1 evening of reasonably heavy rain and that was it.

The diving's been consistently good, maybe a bit of an algae bloom the last couple days, and the water's still warm. No need for the thicker suits just yet, that'll probably occur some time in December.

Here's a shot of that rare yellow phase spotted puffer we've been seeing. I took the shot last year, but we still see this fish from time to time - it's always a thrill for us. Cathy's been leading dives here since the late 70's and it's the only one she's ever seen.

5 manta dives in 8 days, plus a few day charters and puttin' together the scuba office....

.... I slept in 'til 7 today. I decided to start trying to offer the manta dive on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to keep up with the schedule, but I'm sort of getting used to it. After the charters and the cleanup I usually get home from the manta dive about 11:30 to 11:45, which is waaay past my bedtime, and I can't sleep right away. At first getting up at 6 am to do it all over again was really causing me grief - very tired - but I'm starting to get a bit more used to it. We ended up doing an extra night charter to accommodate a group of existing customers and it worked out fine, but I don't know if I'll keep the MWF thing indefinitely or not... sort of depends on what happens this fall when I'm running the office somewhat regularly. For now, as long as I stay away from caffeine in the evening I seem to be able to crash early enough to get enough sleep for now after the night charters.

If the phone doesn't ring, I've got a couple days off. I basically kind of need the days off right now anyway, relax for a day or two at least. I've been 30 straight days on the boat or working on the walls at the office for several hours. I'll still spend a couple hours down there today, but it won't be a 6-15 hour day like a lot of the last month's been. I'm finishing up the slatwall today and then will start working on the trim tomorrow. I've got to take the chopsaw down to the shop tomorrow and start cutting molding that'll cover my stripe in the middle of the walls right now. I'll still have a stripe, it'll just likely not be white.

The video slideshow above is pretty cool in my opinion. One of our customers came over for a bit and carried around a Sealife digital camera and took shots of many of the things she saw. I found this posted on her blog listed as "fish food" on my links on the sidebar and thought it was real neat. Mel's given me permission to post it here. One thing I noticed, she's got a nice picture of an Imperial Shrimp that's not labeled... Theyr'e tough to get a shot of 'cause they generally dart off before you can get the shot. It's on the first cushion star.... it immediately stood out for me when I first watched the video - I've been trying, pretty much unsuccessfully, to get a decent shot of one for years. Anyway, I think her video give a real good idea of what you can potentially see on a dive trip to Kona. Thanks for letting me post this Mel!

Aloha,

Steve

Old dogs can learn new tricks????

We've been real busy this last week, dives every day with a couple of night dives thrown in on top... I'm due for a nap.

Among the passengers this week was a fun couple that were relatively new to diving (less than 50 dives) who passed along something they'd heard about to Bob and I (I'm in the 2K dive range and Bob, who's logged every dive he's done, is at 4900 and then some) that we'd never heard before - not that we can remember anyways, we're both over 50 - You can talk to your buddy underwater by... now this is cool... sticking your regulator on top of his/her forehead and talking through it. Well, it looks stupid, and you better clue your buddy in ahead of time that you might try it, but it does work to some extent. You've got to use few words, and avoid words that are tough to say with a reg in your mouth (I tried the word "big" and it didn't come across, but "huge" was something the customer I tried it with clearly understood). Apparently someone they dove with said it was a Navy Seal trick.

Now I really doubt I'll be using this often, but in rare cases that we have to communicate it's an option.

Here's a photo of something I find interesting... We had a mild junk line off of Eel Cove the other week (currents sometimes make a line of things caught in them) and we found this visor floating off the dive site. Take a look closely... it's got it's own eco-system going. Any time you find something floating in the ocean, there's no telling what else may have been attracted to it and is living around it. In this case it's a bunch of little fish that have taken up residence on the hat. I've seen the same or similar fishes around Oceanic White-tip Sharks and some big jellyfish we see on very rare occasions. I don't know what they are called, but I've even had them show up next to my divers when I've led blue water dives. Most anything floating out in the open will eventually have other life surrounding it apparently.

Later,

Steve

Man, the Kona manta ray night dive is still going strong....

The manta dive has seen 15+ mantas a night for the better part of almost a month and a half now. It's a spectacular event for divers and snorkelers. We did three of them last week, in addition to some day outings - made me tired... I'll use that as my excuse for not posting in that time (but it's more likely that I just haven't had much to say during that time). Going out on the night charters and then having to come back the next morning (or not, depending on the schedule) takes it out of me. I normally hit the hay around 10:00-10:30, after a manta dive it's more like 1am and I don't feel normal for a couple days... what ever happened to the good ol' days when 4 hours was plenty of sleep as long as it wasn't every day? It's our slower season right now so I've got a few days off before it all starts again.

I just got an e-mail that the Manta Ray protection act has made it through both the State House and Senate and is now waiting on the Governor to sign it. The mantas have been unprotected here and there's been a few attempts to get them protected so someone won't come in and harvest them all. Kona is the one place in the world that you know exactly where the mantas are likely to be 30 minutes after sundown, so that raises the risk of them being taken efficiently if someone were to decide to target them... this should help keep that from happening.

The pic above is of a Redstripe Pipefish (Dunckeroampus baldwini). Pipefish are related to seashorses, the males carry the eggs on their undersides, unlike the male seahorses which carry their eggs in a pouch on their bellies.

Reading in John Hoovers new book , which happens to be probably the best book on Hawaiian fish available right now, I just noticed that these particular pipefish were endemic - I didn't know that before tonight. They are typically found in pukas (Hawaiian for "holes") or cracks in rock formations. They're small, maybe 5 inches long in total, and quite slender so they're tricky to point out to other divers. We've got a few of them stashed at a few dive sites so we do get to brief our divers and show them from time to time.

The manta ray night dive in Kona Hawaii is hot right now... here's a quick video clip...

Untitled from Steve on Vimeo.
We did this dive Saturday night. 15 or so mantas were at the site when we arrived, it was 20 by the time we went back to the boat.

This is always a great time when there's even one manta showing up, more is gravy... this was lots and lots of gravy. We spent pretty much the entire dive watching them, did a short pass of the reef at the end and saw something that REALLY excited me (not that the mantas didn't, but one of our divers found something I'd yet to see, and I had the camera in hand), more on that in the next post.

Later,

Steve

Turtle Pinnacle - Turtle cleaning station in Kona Hawaii....

Turtle Cleaning Station Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.
Today's diving was good. Cathy did the first dive, at Golden Arches, and reported viz approaching 200 feet, mentioned it was warmer too. I did the second dive at Turtle Pinnacle. As we approached the dive site we were in very deep water (I didn't have the sonar set up, but we were off the reef and in deep water, probably 150-200 feet) and could still see the bottom. We pulled up to Turtle Pinnacle and probably had 135 feet or so of viz on the reef. This site is not one that's known for it's viz, so conditions were excellent today.

Turtle Pinnacle is a turtle cleaning station. Turtles will swim to there and solicit a cleaning from tangs (surgeonfish). In it's heyday, you could generally count on seeing several turtles there. The last few years it's been more hit and miss. We had two turtles at the site today. One was there for a cleaning, the other looked like it was just looking for a ledge to tuck under for a sleep at the time.

The turtles will often lay down and spread out for a good cleaning. The video above shows classic swimming cleaning behavior. This can get fun if there's several turtles wanting to be cleaned. It's almost as if they get jealous... turtles will swim over to a swimming turtle being cleaned and cut in tight trying to steal their fish!

Later,

Steve

Beautiful day on the water yesterday.... A little on Doc's Pro Plugs for ear problems...

No whale action, but we did catch a glimpse of a large manta on the surface at the end of the second dive. The water conditions were excellent, maybe a degree warmer than a couple days back actually, as Bob's temp gauge jumped up to 75 from 73 the other day.

I've been sitting up top for a while, a strange lower abdominal pull and such, and started diving again last week... only to come down with an ear infection. I guess it's time to invest in another pair of Doc's Pro Plugs to wear when the ears heal up in a couple days. Normally you'd never wear ear plugs when diving as there's a good chance you'll cause yourself lots of damage, but years back a surfer dude/doctor invented some plugs to help keep surfers from getting ear infections, when someone suggested diving he thought about it and realized they'd have to be perforated to allow pressure transfer. They don't keep your ears dry, just limit the amount of continuous water exchange. I've used them in the past and they seem to help, especially with equalizing rapidly. They're handy if you're prone to ear infections or if you have troubles equalizing. I use them when I teach a lot and am going to have to do a bunch of CESAs (controlled emergency swimming ascents) with students. I've lost my share of plugs, it generally only happens with I'm removing my mask for teaching skills and the plug string gets caught on my mask strap and I forget, under normal diving situations I've never lost them. You should be able to find them in your local dive or surf shop, if not I'm pretty sure they sell them direct on line.... just make sure you get the vented plugs for diving.

Here's a shot of a Peacock Flounder (Bothus mancus) on a rock from the other day. I had to take 6-7 shots just to get this - they're really tough to get a decent picture of because they have a knack for landing on light gray rocks and then blending in to match, it's tough to get the exposure right to where the patterns and color show up. This pic doesn't do them justice when it comes to color.

Later,

Steve

Razor Wrasses of Hawaii...

These guys are pretty interesting. There's a couple different species, and frankly I'm not that good at telling them apart on the fly. This one is what we call a Peacock Razor Wrasse (Iniistius pavo). As a juvenile they'll have a very elongated first dorsal spine, oftentimes as long as the body of the fish, they tend to lose it (or keep it back and down) as they mature and it's much less noticeable. The adults are much more pale in coloration than the juveniles, this one's starting to be a "tweener" that's maturing.

We find Razor Wrasses generally in larger sand patches in the shallows, and below the reef in the sand at depth. They're not often easily approachable, as they tend to dive into the sand when you find them. It seems as though they have specific spots they "cultivate" in my opinion, 'cause sometimes they'll move as you approach then get to a spot and hover 'til you get too close and dive in. Interestingly enough, sometimes when you stick your hand in the sand it'll go through like nothing while the sand around it is much more firm. Anyway, these guys seem to have a knack for covering some distance under the sand as you can't dig them up (not that I've ever tried - it's hearsay, yeah that's it).

I used to have a Dragon Wrasse in an aquarium at home a half a life ago, these fish also dive into the sand on occasion and tend to sleep underground at night, mine had the habit of pulling up algae and piling it in one corner of the tank about 45 minutes before my lights were timed to go off and then it would dive into the pile and the oyster shell/dolomite mix for the night.

Pat took this photo, which is better than anything I have of Razor Wrasses, on a dive a couple months back.

We're off to do the manta dive tonight. Water conditions are quite decent today. I heard through the grapevine that there were 7 mantas seen off the airport last night.

Aloha,

Steve

Reticulated Frogfish... Kona Hawaii scuba diving...

We keep seeing these little fish from time to time. Cathy found this one practically right under the boat at Golden Arches on our first charter back after the trip, so I had to pop over the side and get a quick photo. It's since moved and we haven't been able to find it. We've found several this year up and down the coast, now that we know what we're looking for I suspect we'll keep finding them.

Last night's manta dive trip was a success. There were four mantas off the Sheraton, they also apparently had mantas up north off the airport again. There's definitely more surge off the Sheraton site than on the airport site, and as the surf was up a bit yesterday it made for an interesting dive for the divers -- it's hold on for dear life at times. Everyone enjoyed it. I hadn't done a trip down south for the manta dive since getting the boat back as we've had good luck up north pretty much the entire year. It's kind of fun heading south for a change though, and the boat makes the trip much faster and more smoothly than it did before the hull extension and engine change.

Later,

Steve

Short, poorly shot octopus video...

Octopus... eating another octopus! from Steve on Vimeo.
I mentioned in my last post that we saw a large octopus at Kaloko. A week or so earlier we saw one. It was heading to a large rock and I started to switch the camera into video mode. It slid behind the rock and suddenly a small octopus popped out and the bigger octopus came out behind it... I'm thinking "I'm gonna get some octopus sex video", then suddenly it engulfed the smaller octopus and there was a huge ink cloud. By then I've got the camera in video mode, but I didn't have the time to change the camera to underwater white balance from what it was already set at... so the white balance is pretty funky... the focus is off too. Anyway, it appears the bigger octopus ate the smaller one. You can sort of tell there's something within it's mantle. It booked off shortly after I started the video so this is very short.

To bad I didn't have a camera for the octopus 2 days back, as it was cooperatively posing.

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

The last post was too long...

Aloha,

Steve

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

Which Hawaiian island is the best for scuba diving? Is it Oahu, Maui, Kauai, or the Kona side of the Big Island?

I may be biased, I'll bet you can guess my answer....

So I see this question come up occasionally on the scuba diving message boards. There's usually a bunch of responses by people who've only dove one island pushing for that island. I think in reality, diving almost anywhere in Hawaii beats the heck out diving in a lake or quarry somewhere back in North America.

I have done some limited diving on Maui and Lanai and Oahu, and I get a lot of customers coming here after diving on the other islands, and while the other islands do have their strengths, it's tough to match the diving we have here in Kona. I'll make a brief case...

Geologically the Big Island is much younger than the other islands... we're talking millions of years, not hundreds or thousands... so we've got fewer rivers and streams for runoff (Kona has NO permanent streams) and less sand to cloud things up when a storm passes by... so the day to day viz in Kona is tough to match as rain does not affect our visability here. Less sand means fewer beaches, so that can be a problem for some people, although we do have some very nice beaches here if you care to look for them, but rocky shores means clear water, which is great for the diving crowd. Being geologically younger, erosion hasn't had the time to shrink the island and create a widespread fringe reef, but that means at nearly all of our dive sites you can find both shallow reef AND dropoffs into deep water without having to cover a lot of distance... this can be great fun for divers who like a variety of terrain.

The Big Island also has more healthy reef surrounding it than the other islands... This recent report has 57% of the Big Island surrounded by reefs, the bulk of which is on the Kona side, while the other islands are averaging about 20% (I'd have to find another link on the report to show you that, and I'm feeling lazy today, it's out there in all the NOAA links).

Water condition-wise, Kona is unique in the Hawaiian islands in that we have a couple of great big volcanoes that block the tradewinds. What that does is basically gives us relatively flat water all day long, whereas in many diving areas elsewhere in the state you've got the trades kicking up wind chop and swell by noon or earlier that affects the viz and can make for a crummy boat ride back to port. I'm not saying we don't have our crummy days, but you can count on big wind several days a week, not several days a year like here, in many parts of the state. In winter months the other islands to the north and west of us often block out a good portion of the winter storm swells, which can make for OK to great diving conditions here while others aren't so lucky.

Dive operator-wise, Kona has a bunch of good ones. You should be able to find one that meets your needs. If you're looking for a 6 pack boat (6 passengers max, we'll go with as few as two on day dives) with plenty of shade, generous dive profiles and bottomtimes, a sandwich lunch along with snack crackers and trailmix and beverages, as well as very experienced dive guides that know their critters, please consider us and click on the Wanna Dive links in the sidebar of this page.

I could go on and on about why the Big Island is a great place for a vacation... and maybe some day I will... but that'll have to be saved for another day.

I was looking through a few photos I took a couple months ago and I'd forgotten I'd taken this one... it's cool if you know what you're looking at. Since we have dropoffs at most of our dive sites we'll see the deep water predators such as Jacks and Uluas come into the reef looking for prey. This Bluefin Trevally (Caranx melampygus) is activly soliciting a hunting partner - the small Whitemouth Moray (Gymnothorax meleagris) underneath him. The eel was cooperative, although I didn't manage to get a picture of it out actively hunting with the trevally (they move too quickly). When these two species work together, they'll swim along at the same speed and the eel will go through holes to potentially flush something out(or in from the trevally). We see several species of fish hunting together here on a reasonably frequent basis. Multiple species of fish hunting together is referred to as nuclear hunting.

This post sort of says "advertisement" all over it, but I really do believe Kona's the spot to dive in Hawaii if you want to dive. We had a couple on the boat last week who were quite quoteable (they referred to my boat as "beautiful" and "10 times way better than the skiffs we usually dive off of in the Carribean" - also they were very complimentary of Cathy's guide and critter finding skills). They'd done a significant amount of diving in the Carribean and had dove Maui several years back and were apparently quite unimpressed. Well, they were here for several days and decided to give Kona a day of diving... afterwards they'd said the dives had completly changed their opinion of Hawaiian diving. Kona's definitly got some great diving.

Aloha,

Steve