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 It was nasty enough that the waves were breaking in deep water, luckily my boat's a Radon, originally made for rough water urchin harvesting from what I understand, and is quite heavy for it's size so it handled the conditions quite well.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

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

Scuba diving in Kona Hawaii is FUN!!!

We had a last minute charter happen yesterday. The swells of the last couple of days dropped off pretty nicely so we were able to get some good dives in. Bob was the guide for both dives, I played Captain for the day and got a 30 minute "Captain's dive" in while the divers were having lunch and their surface interval on the second mooring of the day.

I took my wife's old Canon A620 down on the dive to try to get familiarized with it. I took a look at it while the divers were down on their first dive and sort of figured out what I wanted to do with the camera. I only took a few shots, here's a shot of an adult phase Yellowtail Coris Wrasse (Coris gaimard). I don't have many, maybe any, shots of the "terminal" phase adults on this blog prior to this photo. These fish go through a pretty radical color change over the course of their lives... they start out as red fish with white diamonds (many people confuse them for clownfish, which we don't have in Hawaii) then eventually lose the white and gain a bunch more colors. They're neat looking in all phases.

The water's still very warm for this time of year. I didn't bother with a wetsuit for the thirty minute dive, although I'd have appreciated it on a longer dive. I was seeing 77 on my computer, we've heard anything from 75-78 on the customer's computers. Yesterday's the first day in almost 2 months I've not seen whales on the water, but we heard them underwater on my dive and the group's second dive. Next month should be the really busy month, although it's been a fabulously good Humpback whale season so far.

No charter today so I'm hanging out at the dive shop 10-5 today.

Aloha,

Steve

Turtles from Hawaii...

We had some big surf roll in Wednesday afternoon. We did a couple of nice dives Wednesday morning and the swell was starting to pick up pretty good by the end of the second dive. Thursday was kind of nasty, today's not quite as bad but still nothing I'd like to dive in if I had the choice. We didn't have anything scheduled for today, if we had we'd have probably gone and given Pawai Bay a looksee before calling the trip, it's a nice place to tuck into and still get a good couple of dives in much of the time in the winter.

Looking at the surf charts, it looks like it'll be better tomorrow and decent from Sunday onward for a bit. One of the nice things about Kona diving is that if you have a few rough days, it can be nice diving pretty much the next day. We have limited amounts of sand, and virtually no soil at the shoreline, so the swell just needs to drop enough to let whatever's in the water settle out and we're back to great viz. I've seen it go from basically undiveable to flat with 80' plus viz overnight here... tough to beat.

Here's a shot of a couple turtles I took on a shore dive in Maui (yeah, they got diving too... personally I prefer Kona) a few years back. I've borrowed on of my wife's older cameras and housings, but the LCD is so small I can't see the settings underwater very well and I've yet to spend the time topside to get familiar enough with the buttons to do it on the fly. The newer cameras are so nice with their larger LCD screens. I've got my eye on a couple different cameras, but that purchase will wait 'til later in the spring or summer for now. I need to just sit down and play with the camera for 20 minutes and I'd feel comfortable carrying it in case we bump into something special.

Currently my next scheduled charter is Monday, so I'm hanging out at the dive shop all weekend to see if I get any walk ins.

Terriffic scuba diving conditions in Kona Hawaii today...

We had very nice day on the water today. The water was glassy flat, there were dolphins outside the harbor on the way out, we had to alter course for whales in our path on the way to Golden Arches, a couple times, underwater viz was well over 125 feet, whales were singing during the dive.... and more.

After the first dive
we had a whale and her calf come up pretty darned close to the boat. The calf was rather boisterous.... repeatedly breaching for a few minutes. I took this photo of a splash close to the boat... missed the whale itself, then ran out of space on the CF card. After deleting a few older photos I managed to get a passable shot of the calf breaching in the distance, it was quite a ways away by this time.. We moved on to Turtle Pinnacle (not a real hotspot for turtles these days, but it's still a great dive) for the second dive. Viz was a bit down in comparison to Golden Arches, but still great.

Aloha,

Steve

Gorgeous morning in Kona Hawaii today...

I pulled over to take a quick shot coming into work this morning. We've had a bit of a breeze the last 2 or 3 days that's blown out all of the vog. I was hoping for a great sunset, but we've got a bit of a front coming in.

We're into the heart of the slow scuba season right now. From what I've seen, lots of the boats aren't running full, if they're running at all. I've got a bit of a lull myself, looks like no charters through the weekend unless I get a phone call. I go with just two divers, I may be one of the few that does, so it doesn't take much to get my boat out for dives. The booking inquiries are starting to pick up for March and May... that's a positive thing... the January/February slow period seems to happen every year for me.

We had a manta charter the other night. Numbers have been a bit on the low side, there were two that night, and we've had to go to the Sheraton site to find mantas. Everyone's hoping the plankton picks up at Garden Eel Cove soon so the mantas come back there. It comes and goes, that the way it is, but when it's thick, the site is thick with mantas.

I'm down at the shop again today. I'll probably be spending quite a few days this upcoming month there. It's looking pretty good. I've got internet at the office, so I've been spending some of my time reworking my Kona scuba diving website a bit in hopes of regaining some search engine karma after switching website URL names in November. That's coming along now too, starting to get e-mails and phone calls generated from the site again after a bit of a slow time.

Later,

Steve

Today was an awesome day on the ocean in Kona Hawaii...

Today was a great day to be scuba diving here. The ocean temperature is still hovering right at 78 or so, the water was flat, viz in the 150 foot plus range, and there were whales everywhere you looked. We saw somewhere between 8 and 20 whales - we saw 8 on the way to Golden Arches, then tons more on the way back to Honokohau Harbor, many of them on the way back were likely repeats, but not all of them... lots of whale activity in Kona right now. I talked at the boat wash at the end of the day with one of my friends that does whale watches, he said it was like that all the way up to Makalawena.

Aloha,

Steve

A quick note.... Been scuba diving some this month...

I'm hanging out at the office again today, but I have charters tomorrow afternoon/eve, Saturday, Monday, Tuesday we've got double charters (am and night) so we're keeping fairly busy for now. My cash register arrived the other day, gotta figure out how to program it now.

The water's amazingly warm for January. We've been seeing 78 degrees - it's much more comfortable than the 72 or thereabouts we had last January. The whales are out in increasing numbers now, we're hearing them sing on a significant portion of the dives. I hope this is the year I finally get to see one underwater... Bob and Cathy have been hogging all the fun the last couple of years... it's a rare and exciting event when it does happen.

I'm on an old laptop I carry to the shop with me, so I don't have new photos to post, I'm trying to link a photo from some time ago on the blog... if it worked you're seeing a school of yellow tangs and whitespotted surgeons grazing on the reef. Surgeons/tangs are herbivores and pick algae off the coral, keeping everything nice and healthy. ....Ah, it seems there's a sizing issue with the photo I don't understand, still works anyway.

Later,

Steve