A gray day around the Captain Cook area today...

We finally got a shot of much needed rain, but not enough to really green things up, I'm hoping it starts up againg this evening. We ofen have our dry season during the winter in Kona, this has been the driest in a could of years. I'm probably going to have to water plants and part of the front yard for the first time in 2 or 3 years soon.

Our last charter was with a fun group. The weather was strange. When we came out of the harbor there was a north wind and a bit of chop, so we went south to get out of it. As soon as we got around the point, the wind couldn't decide which was it was coming from. We took a mooring spot and did first dive. The wind was coming in from all directions, with the boat switching directions on the mooring every 5-10 minutes or so. By the time the second dive was going we'd moved to another mooring and the wind had decided to come in from the South. I Captained so I got to enjoy the surface chop. The dives were still quite nice, with good viz. Highlights were Bandit Angels and a little yellow frogfish, apparently not all noticed the frogfish.

Here's the black phase of the Yellow Longnose Butterfly. This apparently happens nowhere else in the world but Hawaii, and is most common in South Kona. We have dive sites on our longer charters that we can pretty much guarantee seeing these guys. Nearer to town they do not seem quite as common, but they are still found fairly regularly. I'm not sure if they've yet determined why some will go into a black phase, it's one of those things where if you put the fish in an aquarium, it'll turn yellow again in short order.

Later,

Steve

A bit of wind on the water in Kona today....

Not to be confused with the TV show back in '98 or so called "Wind on the Water" or something like that starring Bo Derek, which was filmed in Kona. I think the show lasted 3-4 episodes before they yanked it. The beach where they filmed it is one of the nicer little beaches here, you have to go in to Kehaka Kai Park (north of the airport) and walk in a few minutes towards the north from the parking area to get there.

I had a charter today. We had a nice stiff breeze for a good portion of the day, but it didn't really do anything to water conditions, which were quite nice. I played Captain all day so no diving for me though. I have another charter tomorrow, I think I'm staying up top then also.

We've been a bit slow the first half of the month, but the last half is scheduling up nicely. It was time to catch up on the yardwork and such. We cut down a 20 some odd pound bunch of ripening apple bananas today.... yum yum. I had a bad "banana experience" in the first or second grade - my sack lunch was over the radiator and my banana turned black and mushy, the mean (aren't they all) cafeteria lady made me eat it before I could go play - I'm not sure if I ate another entire banana in one sitting 'til I moved here.

This is a Longnose Butterflyfish (forcipiger longirostris). Much of the indo-pacific region has a common variety with a shorter nose, we have that one and this guy which has a very long nose. In Kona, and pretty much only Kona, we have a very rare coloration of this particular fish, I'll post it on my next post, assuming I can find my one good shot of one I've got filed somewhere in the depths of my hard drive. The long nose on these guys helps them reach inside coral heads to pick at foods.

Later,

Steve

3-D photography? You can do it!

Ok, some of you are going to hate this post, some of you are really going to think this is cool! Stick with me long enough to read the information and instructions.

With the image above, you should be able to see the flower in amazing 3-D!!!! You may have to click on the image and enlarge it to full size to really see it well.

Warning, some of you will probably get headaches and hate me for this.

Anyway, these images are of an iris from the yard and were taken with a normal digital camera, but from slightly different angles. One image was taken slightly from the right, the other slightly from the left... then you reverse the order when looking at the images, so I've put the right image on the left and the left image on the right. You now have a stereo image pair.

To see the 3-D image you will need to back up from your monitor say 18-24 inches and start crossing your eyes. If you cross your eyes so much you have 4 images, you've crossed them too far. You will need to slowly uncross your eyes 'til the middle 2 images merge into one. Once you have a solid image in the middle, with 2 ghost images on the sides (making for 3 images total), the middle image will be in 3-D!!!!

It may take some practice. For most people this is actually easier than those funky poster things that require you to look through an image, so your focal point is beyond the plane of the screen, to see a 3-D effect, in this your focal point is in front of the screen (since you are crossing your eyes) and most people can do this easier.

Feel free to comment as to whether this works for you. I may throw some other pairs I've tried later on if I get a positive response.

Water conditions the last couple of days - bad, although it's settling down right now we are supposed to see another swell tomorrow.

later,

Steve

Hawaii scuba diving rocks...

Well, today it rocks, and rolls. Surf is up. Once again, we are having what is supposedly the biggest swell of the year according to the TV stations. It's not that bad from my place, but I haven't been down to the harbor (no charter today) to check it out. We'll be getting fewer and few of these types of swell as winter passes and we get into spring.

Since I'm not diving today, I think I'll put up another photo of tangs or surgeonfish. These guys are yellow tangs (Zebrasoma flavescens), with a few other assorted fish mixed in. They spend their days picking algae off the reef. The scalpel on these guys isn't as predominant as on the unicorn style tangs. Instead of two fully extended scalpels, they have a single retractible scalpel on each side. Notice the white spot near the tail, that will flip out and give them a blade for defense if needed.

Yellow tangs are one of our more recognizable reef fish. We can have large schools of them working the reefs, although you don't seem to see as many of them in the areas near town as you do further out. Part of that could be harvesting pressures from the aquarium trade - that in itself is worthy of a few posts. The tropical fish collection trade is more regulated these days than in the past, and it seems to be benefitting everyone... fish stocks are increasing, and harvests are increasing... but it can be a hot topic with divers on both sides. Anyway, Kona is likely the top producer in the world of yellow tangs for the home aquarium trade (I may touch on some of this later).

Aloha,

Steve

Surf's up a bit,but still good diving

We had another nice couple on board today for intro dives. One actually had been certified years ago and never dove since and had lost proof of certification, which is quite common - that's no reason not to dive though. There are ways to replace a lost dive card, and intro dives can be done on the spur of the moment. Our intro dives are pretty much the same dives as our regular certified dives, only you have to be with and instructor, perform a few basic skills, and we have a 40' depth limit.

The surf was a bit higher than I expected as we were coming out of the harbor, but luckily the side of the island isn't a straight line - there's usually a point we can go around that'll have flat water behind it. We headed down to Pawai Bay. If you've read the blog thus far and kept track of the swell direction, you'll probably notice that Pawai Bay and the Pinetrees area are usually the most dove spots on northwest swell days we get on occasion during the winter. Pawai Bay was quite reasonable. We had roughly 70-100 foot viz and no surge for the dives today.

I did the second dive. We saw lots of Pyramid Butterflies (Hemitaurichtys Polylepis) and other goodies, as this is a particularly fishy dive, as well as one of the resident Flame Angels (Centropyge Loriculus) we look for in this area.

Here's a reasonably closeup shot of Pyramid Butterfly fish, along with their cousins the Thompson's Butterfly fish, I took a couple months back at a spot around the corner from this site. These guys are one of my personal favorite butterfly fish. They tend to hang out on points or dropoffs, where there are currents or upwellings, in large schools. This particular group of fish was only a small portion of the butterflies in the area and was waiting by a coral head to be cleaned by a cleaner wrasse. It's neat seeing hundreds of the same fish in one spot, on some dropoffs we will see clouds of them.

Aloha,

Steve

Online scuba instruction and training?

So I need to respond to a phone call I received last night which involves a specific inquiry I've been asked once or twice a year lately. The gist of the inquiries involve a specific online scuba training program offered by a specific business, not scuba certification agency, whose name I shall not mention. This business has a website promoting inexpensive online training that will give you a referral form for your open water course that is good "anywhere". BEWARE of such claims, do your homework. I told the guy on the phone to be careful, as I have been warned by PADI about a specific shop offering such a program - that indeed was the shop he'd run across.

There is a legitimate online open water training program offered by SDI (one of the large training agencies - by training agencies I mean structured organizations which produce training programs and have shops and instructors specifically affiliated with them worldwide - not an individual business), but so far this is the only one and I believe they make no clamis that ANY Instructor will honor it, it's an SDI program.

Most all of the scuba certification agencies do offer some sort of computer based self study, such as CD ROM or DVD instruction, SDI offers this and the online option.

I do know for a fact that PADI (the world's lagest scuba training agency) has at least at one point instructed their Instructors not to accept the referrals from the particular business this post is about. I corresponded with them about this last year and they said they had lawyers working on getting these guys to knock off with their claims.

So this post is not a plug for SDI, just a warning that if you are looking into online open water scuba training, do make sure that it is backed up by a specific recognized training agency with affiliated shops and instructors worldwide which offers that program. Also do remember, that most all agencies offer self study programs via book, CD or DVD... you have lots of options for legitimate dive self-instruction.

OK, rant over.

So here's another surgeon fish. I know it as a Naso Tang (Naso literatus) from the aquarium trade. It's also called Orangespine Unicornfish, Lipstick Tang, and probably another name or two. Notice the prominent twin set of orange spines on these guys. Surgenfish are primarily herbivores and spend their days scouring the reef of algae.

Several years back while on an intro dive just outside of the harbor, I saw a veritable river of these guys grazing it's way down the reef in a big school. I'm not talking a dozen or fifty, I'm talking a 6-8 foot wide and 80-100 foot long school of these guys, I figured at the time 600-900 of them in the school and I could've been underestimating the numbers. I can't think of a time that I've seen more than 8-10 together in all my other dives here. I guess it was ono of those one time occasions, I wish I had a camera of some type in hand. It's still one of the more amazing encounters I've had here.

Have a nice day,

Steve

Beer Can Chicken....... Non-Diving related

OK, it's blabber time. Hawaii is blessed in that it's comfortable to barbeque here year round. Tonight I am making beer can chicken. The ingredients are simple... Chicken, beer cans, spices, smoking chips for the barbeque and either onions or apples.

I generally soak my chickens in a brine of soy sauce (sold here by the gallon for a coupld bucks), black pepper and garlic poweder. I mix up a concoction of spices: I use cumin, chili powder, garlic powder, black pepper, red pepper flakes, basil flakes an anything else that strikes my fancy at the time. Soak the chicken, spice it up, stuff an open (we're not making beer bomb chicken) beer can up it's rump and an onion or apple quarter down it's neck and barbeque it. Smoking chips make it all that much better.

Use your choice of beers, preferrably it should be one that you would enjoy the leftovers if you buy more cans than chickens. You could also try soda cans, although I've yet to make a taste test trial. It is VERY important to cook the birds over indirect heat - I've fried numerous chickens to the point that they were charcoal through and through. Once I figured out to heat the other side of the grill only, it got much better.

This chicken can turn out very good, or very bad. On a good day, it's way up there as far as chickens go, on a bad day you might as well eat burnt toast and drink some chicken broth, you might enjoy it more. On a good day, the beer, or whatever you use, steams the inside of the chicken and flavors it a bit, while the smoke and barbeque heat cooks it and flavors it from the outside. It can be very good... I'm ignoring mine right now as I write, I hope it turns out....

.... Ahhh, it turned out




Later,

Steve

Today's Kona scuba outing... Anyone like Unicorns?

It was another day off today. I've got a lot planned for the last half of the month, but it's quite slow right now. I'll get the occasional call the next little bit and fill in some days. I had someone call this morning and we set up some intro dives for Friday. Anyway, today was a fundive day for me. Another trip down the hill to take some photos. I didn't get anything spectacular, but managed to take a couple of photos which'll probably show up on the blog some day. I had high hopes of being able to record some whale singing, but no such luck.

This is a Unicorn Tang (Naso unicornis), also known as a Bluespine Unicornfish, from today. Tangs are a member of a family of fish also known as surgeon fish. They are named so because they all have some type of "scalpel" for defense where their tail joins their body. Scalpels will vary from species to species, some are obvious, such as the large blue blades of this fish, while some are retracted and only come out for fighting.

Here's a little Unicorn Tang story for you... When I was a kid, I think right before the ninth grade, my family went to Maui. We ended up at a beach and my sisters and I went snorkeling. At some point I went off on my own and saw a Moorish Idol and dove down to follow it. I was probably 8-12 feet down and followed it around a truck-sized rock, turned around and suddenly there was this 18 inch fish (it seemed bigger at the time) with a horn on it's head looking straight at me from about 12 inches away.... All's I could think at the time was "that coulda been a shark"... I was on the beach in 30 seconds and didn't go deeper than my waist the rest of the day.

Speaking of sharks... A NOAA researcher saw a great white shark up off Kohala recently and it made the papers. Here's the link to the local paper's article, you may need to sign up..
http://westhawaiitoday.com/articles/2006/02/01/local/local01.txt

Sharks are not really a problem here in Kona, even if we see them. Our water's so clear there aren't cases of mistaken identity. Kona has 2 verified shark attacks EVER, both happened about 2 months after I moved here - 1 was a boogie boarder after sundown, the other was a swimmer quite aways offshore at dusk - not the best times to be on the surface of the water splashing around. Both victims survived, but I do think the kid on the boogie board nearly lost his arm.

I love ending posts on a happy note!

later,

Steve