Ask Steve a question????

Just for fun, I thought I'd solicit questions and see if anyone actually asks questions. I may or may not be able to answer them, but I can give it a try.

A few basic guidelines: Questions can be about the dive biz, my dive biz, Kona, Hawaii, diving, living here, opinions on places or activities here, and things related to them. I'm not going to answer questions about other specific dive businesses, you'd need to contact them to answer questions about them. Personal questions may or may not be answered. I'm staying away from religion or politics, there's plenty of other blogs for that. I reserve the right to not answer anything I feel inapropriate... or that I just don't want to answer for whatever reason...and repetitive questions may be dealt with as a single response.

Getting questions from outside sources may help me cover some different, yet related, subjects... so ask away. Before you ask, I do ask that you look at the very top of the blog, where you'll find a search function that you can search for the subject matter you are curious about to see if it's already covered ad nauseum and refrain from asking something I cover often (like water temperature, today's dive, etc).

I'll do my best to answer questions, and I'll try to be honest about not knowing the answer.... I know a few things, I'm pretty clueless about others.

Feel free to ask questions in the comment section of this post. I will try to get to them as I can, and anything that requires more than a very quick answer will probably appear as a new post. If I get overloaded (I'll be pleased if I get any questions at all, amazed if I get a lot) it might take some time to answer everything.

The critter pictured above is a Hawaiian Red Reef Lobster (Enoplometopus occidentalis). We see them from time to time on the night dive. I was very lucky to get this shot... these guys don't like light and generally will back down into whatever hole they're in front of when you hit them with light for more than a couple seconds or approach too closely. They're sort of tough to show customers because of that, I probably show them to a diver or two about every third time I find them as they'll scoot away before the divers figure out what I'm trying to show them generally.

ASK AWAY!

Steve

I've enabled comment moderation on the blog...

Just a quick note. I've been getting a lot of SPAM the recently, primarily from 3-4 companies trying to sell thier product via my site, and I'm tired of cleaning it up after the fact. From now on, all comments will have to be approved by me before they appear. Don't be afraid to comment if you are not peddling something or are just plain obnoxious (only had that happen once or twice so far). I will approve and respond to comments as quickly as I can.

Aloha,

Steve

Took some underwater video with my Canon G9 on the manta ray night dive tonight....

Kona manta ray night dive April 08 from Steve on Vimeo.

Tonight we had two mantas show up for the night dive. I took my camera down to see how it does with video in low light - I'm quite pleased, it seems to do better than the other point and shoots I've had.

Water conditions were pretty good today, it's still cool though... 75 degrees. I was hoping the big south swell we had the last week would bump it up a bit higher.

later,

Steve

It's "slow season" for a bit....

I looked back at my calender a couple days back and realized I'd had charters scheduled most every day the last 60 days. I did have 4 cancellations in that stretch because of the ATA and Aloha airline closures. Now I'm into a 10 day dead period with little (I have a charter tonight) scheduled and then I have another stretch where I'm working at least 10 days straight. A couple days off now and then is fine, but it's always fun to be working. So far though, it's been a busier spring than in years past and May is looking much better than last year.

I have had a couple of inquiries for charters this week, and I guess it's maybe a mistake to say "I'd be happy to dive with you, I'm wide open so let me know when you'd like to go out". I guess some people are afraid to be the only one's on the boat, like they'll get shortchanged or something, which is the just about the opposite of reality as when we have our lightest loads are the times we can really cater to the individual divers (We're lucky that we only take 6 passengers max, as it's been my experience that the more passengers a boat has on the greater the likelihood there will be some limiting factors), we don't scrimp on the diving just because it's a light load.

Locally, the vog situation in Kona has improved for a couple days at least. We've had huge south swells that have just come down. I'll be looking forward to tonight's charter to see if the water temperature came up because of the swell.

A little Kona news... I may have mentioned that Hooter's closed, if I didn't then here it is. They closed a couple months back saying something along the lines of their target audience apparently wasn't visiting Kona in the numbers they'd expected. Not a big loss for me, I went there once with Pat and wasn't impressed by the food - lackadaisical chicken wings and a very average burger in my opinion. A bigger loss will be the Hard Rock Cafe. They've announced they'll be closing early this summer. They've got fairly decent sandwiches, burgers and salads (good salads are hard to come by here, we see a lot more rice and macaroni salad mixes here than greens). With the loss of those two, of course there've been rumors that Bubba Gumps is on the way out and Kona is soon to be a ghost town.... that rumor was quashed in the local paper by Bubba Gumps management this weekend. It will be curious to see how long the spots held by the two that have or are leaving fill back up.

The underwater photo above is of a Hairy Yellow Hermit Crab (Aniculus maximus). This one wasn't a big individual, say smaller than a golf ball, they can get roughly the size of a softball. I was happy to see it as I hadn't seen one in a while. Take a close look and you can see it's eye stalks... cool looking critters.

That's it for now, time to get a few things done before the afternoon charter.

Later,

Steve

Just discovered Animoto slide shows...

this is a quick test of animoto.com's slide show program

They give you a 30 second slide show for free, longer ones cost something supposedly (I haven't tried it to find out). By the looks of it I tossed on a couple too many photos so everything went by real fast. I may have to see what the longer ones do, as well as if there is a cost involved, at some point. It's pretty interesting as far as a slideshow product goes... lots of action.

later,

Steve

OK, I'm excited about white balance... just stumbled across...

a blog by a guy who's into photography and diving and found this post. Apparently Photoshop has had a white balance, a black balance and a gray balance dropper in their program all along... go to image>adjustments>levels and then look for the droppers in the lower right of the box that opens... whohoo!!!! You can experiment using this on photos that are bluish and get them much closer than you'll likely get them by other means unless you're really talented at Photoshop. I managed to "save" a few old photos in just a couple minutes' time that I couldn't do a whole lot with earlier.

Save your originals! You never know when you'll find out something that'll help you fix a problem you didn't think you could overcome.

Later,

Steve

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

Hawaiian Yellow Margin Moray eel....

We saw this guy on a dive a couple of days ago. It swam right across our path and into a hole on the wall, then turned around to watch us pass. This was a big and thick eel. You can see the yellow margin on the tip of it's tail quite nicely in this pic.

Later,

Steve