Ghost shrimp and current Kona Hawaii scuba diving conditions...

Yay!

Finally, I've got Adobe CS5 on my computer at the shop, and after an update download my camera I bought last year has RAW support... this means, maybe I'll start taking my camera back in the water. I realized the other day that after a year without the camera in the water, I forgot how it works. I didn't even have the zoom/focus ring in the housing so I was pretty much stuck with wide angle, couldn't remember how to change the camera into macro, all sorts of photo mishaps ensued. I did manage to get this ghost shrimp photo though. It was down at 92 feet and this was taken without any type of flash and no zoom control. If you'd see the original photo, it'd be very blue and lacking in detail or color, the nice thing with RAW and underwater photography is that you can set the white balance after the fact and there's a real decent chance in getting the orginal colors back.

Ghost shrimp are also known as Fountain Shrimp in many parts of the world, named after the foutainous spray of their antennae I guess. They're a pretty decent sized reef shrimp, not eatin' size, but big compared to what we usually see.

We've had a pretty good south swell lately, with a fair amount of west in it on occasion. South we can deal with, west can be a problem if it's big enough. From the dive shop I can see things are kind of washed out near Honokohau Harbor (yesterday they were just fine). Tomorrow we have 3 intro divers and a couple of certified divers on the boat, hopefully it'll settle down by then. One of the very nice things about Kona diving is that because of the lack of soil at water's edge, it can be stirred up one day and cleared up the next if the surf settles down. Sand, the limited amount that there is on the reefs here, settles out very fast and we can have 100+ foot viz the day after having poor viz.

Yesterday's diving gave me the first 79 degree reading for an entire dive that I've had this year. Things are finally starting to warm up. It never got "cold" here (by our standards) this winter, but it has yet to really start getting warmer either. Last year it maxed out at about 79 degrees, I'm hoping we see 80/82 later this summer and into the fall. The warmer water temperatures often will hold out through November and early December.

Time to give the boat a little touch up...

Well, after 3 years of dings and scrapes it's time to give the boat a light touch up on the interior paint. One fo my newer hires, Brian, is pretty handy so we've been redoing the electrical to make sure everything's working right and now he's been playing with fiberglass touching up the cosmetic end a bit filling in the tank dings. Should be ready for painting shortly. We're going to try to do it on our own rather than pay thousounds for the local boat guys to do it. For the exterior, I spent an hour or two of hand buffing and it looks a lot better. We'll see if that can last us another year or two before having it professionally done.

We've had pretty nice weather in Kona lately, can't say the same with Oahu and Kauai. I've been running into people who've seen a lot of rain on the other islands the last several days. Kona is blessed in that it sits in the weather shadow of the other islands to the northwest, and behind a volcano which shields it from weather approaching from the east. We still get our occasional foul weather days, but it's nowhere near as bad as what some other areas see.

In honor of cleaning up the boat, here's a cleaner shrimp. I really think these critters are neat. They live in coral heads and set up shop, fish will visit them and the shrimp will crawl all over the fish picking parasites and other unwanted critters off and make a meal of them.

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

So it's December... a big northwest swell comes in... and the water temperature in Kona goes up 4 degrees???!!!

Last night I led the Kona manta ray night dive and I was toasty warm. Weird. A couple of weeks back the water temp took a tumble and I figured it was time to start thinking about getting into a 7 mil wetsuit for the first time since moving to Hawaii... then we had biggish surf for a week and I expected it to be cooler, but it's now sitting at 79 on a computer that maxed out at 80 degrees this summer. Very comfortable scuba diving right now.

Last night we did the manta dive. We pulled up to the dive site at Garden Eel Cove and could immediately could tell the viz was fabulous. Despite the late afternoon sunlight you could easily see everything on the reef from topside. My guess without being in the water for the first dive was that it had to be in the 200 foot or higher range. Even the customers, who had been on a dive a couple days back with about 200 foot of viz, commented on how clear it was and that they'd never dove in anything this clear in their diving the Caribbean. I went down for the night dive while Captain Cathy watched the boat for the night dive. There was virtually no plankton at the site. Two manta rays showed up and cruised the divers for a few minutes then took off... they know when the food's not to be found. At that point we turned it into a very nice night dive.

Slipper lobsters, Bulls-eye lobster, cusk eel, several moray eels and LOTS shrimp and other critters were seen on the night dive.

We do the night dive again on Wednesday (tomorrow) and Friday, and I'm hoping there's more plankton so the mantas stick around, but the night dive itself can be fabulous out off the Kona airport site. Later it was reported that there were no mantas present at the Sheraton site last night. We typically go to the airport site, which usually has larger numbers of mantas than the other site, unless it's just not happening there. We'll probably stick there for now since nothing's been seen down south lately... it's a much nicer night dive up at the airport site if the mantas don't show.

Here's a male Marbled Shrimp (Saron marmoratus), one of the shrimp we commonly see on the night dive when we're doing our cruise around on the way back to the boat.

Later,

Steve

It's cloudy and cool in South Kona today....

It's cloudy and cool at my home today, I'm not sure how it is up in town. One of the unique things about the Big Island of Hawaii is that the weather conditions can be totally different just 10-15 miles away at any given time.

Last night we did the manta dive again... lots of mantas. Bob led the dive and came up with a count of about a dozen. It's pretty slow right now, we went with just two divers and I noticed the few other dive companies that went were also well short of their capacities. It was a great dive and great conditions for those who did make the dive last night. I've got the weekend off at this point, on Monday I've got a double with a two tanker in the morning and then turn around and do the two tank afternoon/evening dive right after that.

Here's one of my best photos of a Banded Coral Shrimp (Stenopus hispidus). This one's pretty big as far as these shrimp goes. I took this one several years ago with my first digital camera I owned (Olympus D40). I haven't taken any photos in a while since the demise of my G9, I think I may head down the hill tomorrow morning and try a short dive with one of my wife's older cameras to shoot some pics. It's an older camera and I can't really even see the control menu on the LCD screen when I'm diving - You get spoiled with the newer cameras and their 3 inch LCD screens. Hopefully I'll be able to get some decent shots.

Later,

Steve

Great scuba diving in Kona Hawaii today....

Here's a Harlequin Shrimp (Hymenocera picta) feeding on a Blood Star. These little shrimp feed on the tube feet and legs of starfish. They are occasionally found deep in antler corals. When we find them we consider ourselves lucky, they often stay in the same coral head for long periods of time so we've got a shot at finding them repeatedly.

We're at the start of a long stretch of days of dive charters. Today we were at High Rock for the first dive. I captained and the divers came up quite happy... great viz - 150' plus, along with lots of critters. Cathy said if the pinnacle wasn't in the way they could've probably seen the boat from the north arch (we're probably talking 200-250 feet or so)... man, that's clear. Between dives we moved down to Golden Arches and I hopped in for a Captain's dive, the surge had come up by then and the water was a bit milky, but probably still in the 125' plus visibility range. I didn't bother putting on my wetsuit... it's running 80 degrees for water temperature right now. It was a good day.


Later,

Steve

Maybe I've been wrong all along....

Yesterday I was doing the navigation portion of an Advanced Open Water certification. Part of what we have to do for that is run a 100' course while counting kick cycles and timing it. We have a 150' line on the boat for this so I took it down for the students to follow. I'd guessed at the viz to be 70-80 as it was a mediocre day... well, 100' of the line out and I could still see my divers, barely. I guess I'll have to call it 70-80 feet of "good" viz, but viz was more in the 100' range. Now I'm tempted to take the line down on a good day just to see what the viz really is. I've always called some of our better days as 100'+, but I'm now betting it's actually much better than that.

So you're probably looking at the picture above and wondering what's interesting about it... it's a wire coral in front of my hand (I had to give the camera something to focus on)... but that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is what's on it. It practically takes a magnifying glass, but if you saw this particular wire coral while underwater you might notice there are not one, but two, Barred Wire Coral Shrimp living on it. Here's the slightly closer view with the shrimp circled. These little guys are tough to spot. I'd noticed one on this particular coral several months back, then decided to check on it a few weeks ago and noticed a shrimp of a different size than I remembered. Last week I decided to pop a quick picture of it, I thought there were two shrimp on it at the time (they tend to crawl to the opposite side of the coral when you get close enough to investigate) and the pic confirms it.

Now I'm wanting to break out my closeup lenses and external strobe and see if I can get a picture of one. They're much larger than the Siphopteron Quadrispinosum I took a picture of the last summer (I'm thinking I posted pics last June or July) with the closeup setup, so there's potential for a good picture if I'm lucky.

later,

Steve

So here's a weird story....

Back in the fall, I think around early October, Pat told me I needed to stop in at Border's books to pick up a copy of the second season of Heroes while they were on sale that weekend. I picked up the copy and went to the register. In line the guy next to me reminded me of someone I grew up watching on TV as a teenager and beyond but hadn't seen since the mid-90's. You know how some people really look like someone and this guy was practically the spitting image of a rather famous person back in the day. I finally said to him "you look just like so-and so did a decade or two back, do you ever get that?" or something to that effect, he replied he gets that from time to time. So then, more thinking to myself, I said out loud "is he still alive?" and then as I was leaving Border's I thought, gosh that's a rude thing to say, that person's probably out there living a great retired life right now. Anyway, I'd forgotten about that 'til recently.

Here's a picture of a female Marbled Shrimp (Saron marmoratus, the males look different, they have really long arms/claws. These are one fuzzy shrimp. I dove today for the first time in 6 weeks or so due to whatever I've had going on. It was great getting back in the water, although I was really surprised at how cold the water was when I dove the mooring ball.... brrrrrr.... it's four or five degrees cooler than last time.

Here's another weird story. I had the day off about a week or so before Christmas and I was watching the Bonnie Hunt show. She had Tim Conway on and it was a delightful segment. At the end Bob Newhart shows up pushing a cake out as it apparently was Tim Conway's birthday. So here's Bonnie Hunt, she's all a-twitter about being surrounded by two legends of the comedy world. I'm thinking I could understand that, she must be pretty excited. She was standing there next to both of these gentlemen and said it's great to have both of them on the show, then Bob Newhart said something along the lines that he figured he needed to get out more... he was standing in line a few weeks back at a Borders and the guy next to him said "you know, you look like "him" and that he said he gets that from time to time, then the guy said "is he still alive?"

Wow, DEJA VU.

Road construction update... Whoohoo!!! Kona has a new highway... sorta kinda anyways...

They opened up the north bound lanes of the highway from Palani Road to Honokohau Harbor the other day. This hopefully will really speed up traffic to the north in the mornings from here on. They still have about a half a year's work, at least, on the south bound lanes and the area between Palani and Henry Street. I'll try to take some photos of the work in the next little bit.

Yesterday was a fun day, we had a certified diver and two intros, so both Cathy and Bob were on board as we don't mix students and certified divers unless it's a family thing. Everyone had good dives. Cathy and her diver had a 15-20 foot pelagic manta ray swim up to them. The pelagic rays are open ocean rays and are slightly different than the resident ones we typically see... big and solid black with a white saddle. She said the remoras that were tagging along with this one had to be 10 pounds each, which is huge compared to the little ones we see on the local rays.

So here's an almost irritatingly too close closeup of a Banded Coral Shrimp (Stenopus hispidus). I was playing with the new closeup lens.

Later,

Steve

David Blaine holds breath for 17 miutes and 4 seconds... wow!

Ok, I usually don't post non-Hawaii news items, but this one's sorta related to diving, freediving anyway. He had to hyper-oxygenate (I think that would be the phrase) himself for 25 minutes first to do it, but it's still nuts.

Here's the story.

...and a somewhat related video...

I'd be happy to be able to comfortably hold my breath a minute and a half or two. Quick story, a few years back at DEMA, there was a freediving organization that held classes in the display pool offering to get people to where they could hold their breath for 4 minutes. I think 5 or 6 took it on and I saw the final round... one participant popped up 20 seconds short and took about 3 breaths and was fine, the others all made it and a couple said they were very relaxed and probably could've done another minute... Mamalian diving reflex is an interesting thing.

I don't think I've posted this particular pic of a Ghost Shrimp (also called a "fountain shrimp" in some parts of the world) before. These are a larger shrimp than the Banded Coral Shrimp pictured a few posts below. They typically hang upside down in clefts in rock.

Current Kona water and air quality conditions.....April 18th, '08

We've got a huge south swell right now. I should've taken my camera with me downtown today to take a picture in Kailua Bay... lots of water pounding against the sea wall. The winds have been coming up the last two days also so it's been pretty sloppy on the water.

The volcano is still actively putting out lots of gasses. They've been off and on issuing voluntary evacuations in communities near the park the last couple of weeks. Wednesday morning they even had a sulfur dioxide alert in HOVE, which is on the west side of the island, and were calling for a voluntary evactuation of the whole area... luckily that was shortlived and called off in about 2 and a half hours. Here in Kona we haven't had the sulfur dioxide issues, but the vog has been very thick for the better part of two weeks now - yuck, we haven't had a good horizon in most of that time and sunsets have turned into a big orange ball with orange sky.

Here's a pair of Banded Coral Shrimp I found the other day. They've set themselves up in a hole that used to house a pair of Ghost Shrimp at Turtle Pinnacle. Hopefully they'll stick around and it'll become a nice eel spot - eels often go into holes where these guys live so the shrimp will clean them, the shrimp will climb on the eels looking for parasites to pick off.

Later,

Steve

Moray eel cleaning station.

Eel cleaning station from Steve on Vimeo.

Well, the Brightcove video hosting experiment is over, they've stopped the uploading of personal videos to concentrate on their business applications. So this is a trial with Vimeo.com . It's pretty easy to use so far, I've only loaded this compressed video on to it. I'll try something uncompressed larger later on.

Anyway, this is a cleaning station down deep. Cleaner shrimp of various types will set up and eels and other fish will come by for a cleaning. Shrimp seen here are a scarlet cleaner shrimp and a ghost shrimp. I took this with my Canon G9, and a hand held flashlight.

Aloha,

Steve

PS: Just looked at the blog... you can go into full screen mode if so inclined with this quite readily, cool, I'll have to upload some uncompressed stuff to see how it looks.

The humpback whales have returned to Kona Hawaii...

Wish I had some pictures of Humpbacks, Banded Coral Shrimp will have to do. Pat took a shot of these a couple weeks back. I really liked this picture because of the second shrimp being in the background.

We've been hearing reports of whale sightings lately. We joined in on a garage sale on the weekend to get some old junk out of our garage and could see them off in the ocean off Kailua town in the afternoon.

Maybe this will be the year I get to see the whales underwater? Bob has, Cathy has, even some of my customers have on dives I've captained... I'm about due I hope.

Aloha,

Steve

Sloppy water in Kona the last few days...

Aloha,

We've hit a rare little stretch where the water is quite rough. Surfers are probably loving it, but it's not great for diving in. On the manta dive the other night it was pretty nice, but the surge was coming up. On the way home the winds were sort of battling the swell and it was a rough ride, and it seems to have more or less stayed that way for a couple of days. This afternoon I could hear the surf from my home, which is about 2.5 miles by road and over a mile as the crow flies from the ocean. I'm hoping it settles down, the news said to expect big swells on Oahu - sometimes they hit us, sometimes they are blocked by Oahu and Maui.

The picture above was taken by Pat on a dive a couple of weeks back, it's a semi-closeup shot of a cushion star. The neat thing about this photo is the critter that was on it - here's a closeup....
This is some type of Imperial Shrimp which hangs out on the cushion stars. Different colored stars will have shrimp that more or less match the color of the star fish, so they're tough to find lots of the time. You'll also often find tiny little crabs and bristle worms and such on these stars.

Later,

Steve

Banded Coral Shrimp in Kona Hawaii.

We had a cool cloudy day in south Kona today. I had the day off and didn't make it into town, so I have no idea what it was like in Kailua or north today. That's one of the wierd things about the Big Island, the weather where you are isn't necessarily what the weather is 15 miles away... we have to explain that to customers sometimes when they're up at the resorts and it's blowing a gale, it's often windfree down where we're diving.

A little news I saw in yesterday's paper that may affect some shoredivers... The ladder at the old wharf at Mahukona apparently washed away during big surf recently. There's been some type of ladder there for years, it was rebar for a long time, then sometime in the last couple of years someone put in a stainless pool ladder. Anyway it's gone and nobody at the county is making a decision as to whether they are responsible for replacing it or not. They noted they'd make a decision later in the week. I suspect some local mystery benefactor has been putting it in all these years and may have to do it again to get it put back in, in the meanwhile, it's somewhat of a safety issue because people have been using it for years and it's quite difficult to get out of the water at times without it.

The photo above is of a pair of Banded Coral Shrimp (Stenopus hispidus). I noticed something a bit interesting when I enlarged it to check on sharpness/focus earlier, they're expecting... soon it'll be time for them to pass out a lot of little waterproof cigars, take a look at the belly and you'll notice eggs. Many shrimp, lobsters and other crustaceans carry their eggs 'til they hatch.


Aloha,

Steve

Cleaner Shrimp

Here's a rather close up view of a cleaner shrimp (Lysmata amboinensis)I took the other week. These guys usually set up on a rock somewhere and then fish (usually eels, triggers, puffers and such) will come in for a cleaning where the shrimp crawl all over them and pick parasites off.

We've been real busy. Right now I've got a family who's finishing up their Open Water referral dives with us. It's great fun. Our boat is basically full all week, with 2 seats available on the evening of the 31st.... Spring break is keeping us hopping.

I thought I'd pass along a litte something I just discoverd about blogger in case you haven't noticed. At the bottom of each post I'm now allowed to label the post. If you click on the label, you should get other posts with the same label to show up. For instance, this post is labeled shrimp, if you click on it other posts I've given the shrimp label should show up for you. Eventually I'll go back through the last year and a half of posts and label them all. Time to hit the hay, I've got to get up at 6 for tomorrow's charter.

Later,

Steve

Hawaiian Spanish Dancer Nudibranch

So last night we did the night dive and came across a Spanish Dancer Nudibranch (Hexabranchus sanguineus). These are the lagrest nudibranchs found in Hawaii. I was quite excited and pulled out the camera and took a few shots.... I could tell they turned out looking at the monitor, but it got better.... I saw something else.

Spanish Dancers can grow to up to at least 15 inches according to John Hoover's book "Hawai'i's Sea Creatures" (linked on the sidebar of this page, it's the best invertebrate book you'll likely find on Hawaiian critters). They have fairly large eye stalks (the two red things on the lower part of the picture) and an impressive frilly gill structure (nudibranch translates into "naked gill"). Occasionally, and this is the really exciting part, they pick up hitchhikers. If you click on the picture above to view it in larger mode and look at the frilly gill structure, you might notice something slightly out of place with a large white patch... look closer....

Just in case you don't see it, here's an enlarged view of the gill structure section of the same photo.... WOW!! (although I wish it came in clearer). Do you see it now?

My camera isn't really set up to take shots at night. If I find something I want to take a photo of I have to shine a light on it at a distance that won't scare it and then try to hold the camera still enough to get a focus lock and hope the flash is enough to light up the whole subject. In this case what I noticed in the gill structure was an Imperial Shrimp (Periclimenes imperator). These shrimp tend to match the color of the nudibranch and are not very common. We see similar shrimp on other critters (sea stars and urchins and such) but they're usually much smaller. Here's a closer photo I took, gotta warn you it' not in focus though, it was practically running from my light.

As for the rest of the dive, we had one manta for the entire dive (showed up right under the boat and swam along with us and a group of the next boat towards the dive site). The water temperature read 73 degrees on my computer, but it seemed warmer than the 73 I dove in a couple of weeks ago (this was my first dive since my little calf boo boo).

Aloha,

Steve

Surf's actually not all that bad....

I took a shot of this cleaner shrimp on a fun dive yesterday. I had no charter so I went down to the Place of Refuge to get wet for an hour. Things were a bit more stirred up than usual in the shallows, but the swell they've predicted really hasn't disrupted the diving much at all. Water temperature is still quite nice. I was seeing 79 degrees yesterday morning at depth on the dive.

We put a new carburetor on the boat the yesterday. It seems to be a never-ending money pit, that's the way boats are, but it runs noticeably nicer.

It's still a little slow for us right now, but it's sort of the calm before the busy season. The last half of the month is starting to book up.. if you are looking at diving in Kona, get on my Wanna Dive website and e-mail me - I'd be happy to set something up.

Well, off for now.

Steve

Happy thanksgiving to all.

Today I was doing some academic work with some students. Afterwards I met Pat down at the Kona Brewing Company for some pizza and a porter or two.... yum, yum. It was pouring down rain when we left the Brewpub, one of those rains where you get a half inch in about 15 minutes. We kind of needed it.

Last night we did the manta ray night dive off the airport. Nice night. They'd been predicting 10-15 foot swells from the northwest off Oahu and the other islands the last day and a half, but we were pretty much shaded from that swell by the other islands and only had some slight rollers. There ended up being very little plankton at the dive site for some reason, so the mantas that were there weren't hanging around much, just doing flybys. They still had them off and on for the better part of 45 minutes so everyone had a good time, maybe not as nice a time as the night before when there were 13 mantas and plenty of plankton... the show can be pretty much determined by presence or absence of plankton.

Guess I haven't posted the current Kona water temperature since I've been back, mainly because I've been playing Captain 'til my cough from the cold goes totally away. Bob and the customers have been seeing 79-81 degrees, depending on who's computer, during the dives this last several days.

The pic above is of an undulate moray being cleaned by a banded coral shrimp. Once you find a spot where one is being cleaned, it's quite possible that you will see it, or other morays, there on a regular basis soliciting a cleaning.

I've got the day off tomorrow, we're going to try the buffet at the Sheraton Keauhou for the holiday - I haven't eaten there yet so it'll be interesting to see how it compares with others we've eaten at over the years.

Aloha,

Steve

Still alive and well in Kona.....

I haven't posted lately ... I came down with the flu last week and just haven't felt like writing anything. More or less back to normal now. Tomorrow I get to work on the boat some. It's a case where a 16 buck part fails and it takes 10 days (mostly waiting on new parts) and a lot more than 16 bucks to get back to where you started. The joys of owning a boat... that's what credit cards are for I guess. Should be back up and running tomorrow afternoon. I have classes later in the week so the boat needs to be back to normal by the weekend.

Ironman came and went. I had the weekend off and was looking forward to actually going downtown for the activities (we usually just try to stay as far away as possible) but spent the whole weekend in bed instead. The quake had basically no noticeable effect on the event. I did talk to a gentleman who lives up north in the area most affected and heard some interesting/even scary stories. Sounds like I need to take the highway up north to Pololu and check things out.

The picture above is a top looking downward view of one of the Harlequin shrimp I posted a month or two back (go to the archives to see that photo). They are such a cool find.